How to Get a Word of the Day Notification on Your Phone
Getting a word of the day to actually arrive on your phone is easy once you know the two things that trip everyone up. Both of them are quiet failures. Nothing errors, nothing tells you off, the notification just never turns up and you assume the site is broken.
Here is the whole thing, iPhone first because iPhone is where the extra step lives.
On iPhone, you have to add it to your home screen first
This is the one that catches everybody, including me the first time I built something with web push.
Safari will not deliver push notifications to a site you are just visiting in a tab. The site has to be installed to your home screen first. Until you do that, the button that turns notifications on cannot work and depending on the site it may not even appear.
The steps, on iOS 16.4 or newer:
Open the site in Safari. It has to be Safari for this part. Chrome on iPhone is Safari underneath but the install flow lives in Safari's own share sheet. Tap the Share button, the square with the arrow coming out of the top. Scroll down the list and tap Add to Home Screen, then Add. Close Safari and open the site again from the new icon on your home screen. Now turn notifications on and when iOS asks whether to allow them, say yes.
That last bit matters. Opening it from the icon rather than from Safari is what makes it a proper installed app as far as iOS is concerned and only then does the push channel exist.
Why does iPhone make you do that?
Apple only added web push to iOS at all in 16.4, in March 2023 and they gated it behind installing to the home screen. The reasoning is that installing is an explicit signal you want an ongoing relationship with the site, which stops any page you glance at from asking to notify you. Reasonable enough. It is just unfortunate that nothing on screen explains it, so it reads as broken.
On Android it is one step
Chrome on Android has supported web push for years and it does not require installing anything. Open the site, tap the button that turns notifications on, tap Allow when Chrome asks.
You can still add it to your home screen if you want it to open like an app and Chrome will usually offer. It makes no difference to whether notifications work.
Firefox and Edge on Android work the same way. Samsung Internet does too.
On a laptop or desktop
Same as Android. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on macOS all handle web push directly with no install step. Notifications land in your system notification centre, so on a Mac they appear top right and go into Notification Centre.
Worth knowing that a desktop notification only arrives while the browser is running. It does not have to be the active window and the site does not have to be open in a tab, but if you have quit the browser entirely then nothing is listening.
The permission everyone misses
Here is the second quiet failure and it applies on every platform.
If you have ever tapped Block on a notification prompt for a site, the browser remembers and it will never ask you again. It will also not tell you that is why nothing is happening. The button appears to work and no notification ever comes.
On iPhone, go to Settings, then Notifications, find the app in the list and check that Allow Notifications is on. On Android Chrome, tap the three dots, then Settings, then Site settings, then Notifications and find the site. On desktop Chrome, click the icon to the left of the address bar and check Notifications is set to Allow.
The other one worth ruling out is battery optimisation on Android. Some manufacturers and Samsung and Xiaomi are the usual suspects, are aggressive about stopping background delivery for anything they decide you do not use enough. If notifications arrive for a few days and then quietly stop, that is usually what happened. Exempting the browser from battery optimisation fixes it.
Do you need an app for this?
No and I would gently argue you are better off without one. A native app means an install, an update cycle and a thing sitting on your phone for one notification a day. Web push gives you the same notification through the browser you already have. It is the same delivery mechanism underneath either way.
The one genuine advantage a native app has is that it can do things in the background that a website cannot. For a word of the day, there is nothing to do in the background. The server sends one message and your phone displays it.
Setting it up here
On word, daily. you pick the level you want, the time and the days and if you like, the kind of work you do so the words lean towards your field. Then you turn notifications on. iPhone users, do the Add to Home Screen step above first or the button cannot do its job.
The practical tip I would give anyone setting this up is to choose a time you are already stationary. Not your commute, not the second your alarm goes off. Somewhere you are sitting down with a coffee, because a word you actually read for twenty seconds is worth about five you swipe away. There is more on why that matters in what happens to the words you look up and if you want to compare what is out there, I have gone through what each word of the day app actually sends you.