Install Teacher’s Bet on an iPhone

By Alex Thornton · author of the MIT-licensed teachersbettextbook library · Last reviewed 1 August 2026

On an iPhone or iPad, the easiest route is the real thing: Teacher’s Bet is on the App Store, with the same board, calculators, Learn course and Report Card as the site. This page is for everyone else: Android, and anyone who would rather keep the web app.

It takes about twenty seconds in Safari's Share menu, and it gets you an icon, a full-screen app with no address bar, and the only way alerts work at all on an iPhone today: Safari gives notifications to an installed web app and never to a tab.

Six steps

1. Open teachersbet.com in Safari. These are Safari’s menus, and Safari is the path Apple documents. Another iPhone browser keeps the same item somewhere else in its own menus.
2. Tap Share. The square with an arrow leaving the top. On the default iOS 26 layout there is no Share button on screen: tap the three dots beside the address, then Share. On the bottom-toolbar layout the glyph sits in the bar itself.
3. Scroll to “Add to Home Screen”. The sheet lists apps first, then actions, so the item is further down than it looks. If it is not there at all, tap Edit Actions at the foot of the sheet and switch it on.
4. Tap Add, top right. The name comes through as Teacher’s Bet and the icon is the Ace of Apples.
5. Open the icon from the Home Screen. No address bar, no tab bar: Safari’s chrome hands its space back to the board.
6. Sign in inside the app. iOS gives an installed web app its own storage, so being signed in on the Safari tab counts for nothing here. The email sends a 6-digit code you type, which means nothing depends on a link opening in the right place.

Then the bell, if you want alerts

The bell above the board is the one switch. It turns on when four things are true: the app is on the Home Screen, iOS is 16.4 or later, you are signed in on Extra Credit, and you allow notifications at the iOS prompt. After that an alert arrives with the app closed, and what it rings for lives in Settings in the account menu, at a threshold you set.

An alert is a calculation surfacing: a posted price paying above the de-vigged consensus fair line, with the time it was computed and the time the venue last moved it. It is never an instruction to bet. Arbitrage is deliberately not an alert, because those gaps close in seconds and no notification can honestly arrive that fast; the board flags them instead, free.

What the icon changes, and what it does not

• Full screen. The address bar at the top and the toolbar at the bottom are gone, and the board gets that space back on the screen that has least of it.
• Alerts become possible. This is the only way to get them on an iPhone. It is an Apple rule about which sites may hold a push subscription, not a Teacher’s Bet gate.
• Storage is separate. The sign-in, the Report Card (which is kept in the browser, not on the server), the time zone and the Simple/Quant choice all live per install. Prices logged in the Safari tab stay in the Safari tab. Pick one and log there.
• Still no offline mode, on purpose. The service worker handles notifications and caches no prices. A cached price is a price without an honest timestamp, and every number here is supposed to arrive carrying both of its times.
• The math is identical. Same endpoints, same formulas, same free tier. Installing buys screen space and the ability to be notified, and nothing else.

If it does not go to plan

• No “Add to Home Screen” in the sheet. Either the page is open in another browser, or the action has been switched off: Edit Actions, at the foot of the share sheet, turns it back on.
• The icon opens with an address bar. That is a shortcut rather than an installed app, which is usually what another browser’s version of this menu item makes. Remove it and repeat from Safari.
• The icon is not on the Home Screen. Check the App Library page at the far right, or pull down and search for Teacher’s Bet.
• The bell will not switch on. In order: iOS 16.4 or later, opened from the Home Screen icon rather than a tab, signed in inside the app, on Extra Credit, and allowed under Settings › Notifications › Teacher’s Bet. The bell says which one is missing when you tap it.

Removing it

Press and hold the icon, remove it, confirm. That deletes what the app stored on the phone. What happens to your Report Card depends on whether you are signed in. Signed out, the card lives in the page for one bet at a time and goes with the icon. On an Extra Credit account it is held on the server, so it is still there on your next device, and you can take it with you either way: Export CSV and Export JSON sit on the card itself, beside the delete controls. The site stays exactly where it was in Safari, and deleting an icon cancels nothing.

On Android, briefly

Chrome’s menu offers Install app or Add to Home screen, and the result is the same full-screen app. Android allows notifications in an ordinary tab, so installing there is preference rather than a requirement.