App Shortcuts

Brewser can turn any app you've installed into its own entry in the Homebrew Menu. Pick an app, create a shortcut, and it shows up in hbmenu with its own name and icon — launching it boots straight into that app, skipping the Brewser shell entirely. Under the hood the shortcut is a small forwarder that hands Brewser the app to open; it isn't a copy of the app or of Brewser itself.

Creating a shortcut

Every app's detail modal in the Brewser shell has a Create shortcut button (offered once the app is installed). Pressing it writes a small forwarder .nro to sdmc:/switch/ on your SD card, carrying that app's own icon. The file is named after the app, so an app called Compass becomes switch/Compass.nro.

When it's done, close Brewser: the app now appears as its own entry in the Homebrew Menu, with its name and icon, alongside your other homebrew.

This is an hbmenu entry, not a home-screen tile. The shortcut appears in the Homebrew Menu — the same launcher you already open Brewser from. It is not a Horizon home-menu tile: nothing new appears on the Switch's home screen next to your games.

What launching it does

The shortcut is a tiny forwarder. When you launch it, it starts Brewser with a launch parameter — the target app's id — and Brewser boots directly into that app.

That launch skips the Brewser shell completely: no home page, no catalogue, no toolbar. The app opens fullscreen and behaves like a standalone homebrew title. Exiting the app returns you to the Homebrew Menu.

Shortcuts track the installed app

Because the shortcut launches by app id, it always runs whatever version of the app you currently have installed. Updating the app updates what the shortcut opens — you don't need to recreate the shortcut after an update. If the app isn't installed when you launch the shortcut, Brewser shows a short screen telling you to open Brewser and download it.

Shortcuts are launchers, not copies. A shortcut doesn't contain the app or the runtime — it's still Brewser doing the work underneath. The Brewser .nro must stay installed at sdmc:/switch/brewser.nro; every shortcut ultimately boots it. Removing or moving Brewser breaks all of your shortcuts at once.

Removing a shortcut

There's no shortcut-management screen inside Brewser — creating a shortcut is the only thing the shell does here. To remove one, delete its .nro from sdmc:/switch/ yourself: power off and edit the SD card on your computer, or use an on-device file manager. Deleting switch/Compass.nro removes the Compass shortcut and nothing else; the app itself (and Brewser) are untouched.

Advanced: it's an ordinary NRO

The shortcut is a plain homebrew .nro like any other, so you can point standard forwarder tooling at it — for example, to build your own home-menu forwarder chain if you want the app on the Switch home screen. Brewser itself deliberately generates only NRO shortcuts, not NSP forwarders; that's a scope choice, and anything beyond the hbmenu entry is left to existing tools.

Related

• Customize Brewser — the SD-card files that drive the shell, which live under the same switch/brewser/ folder
• Engine Status — what the runtime each shortcut boots into can actually do
• How the Runtime Works — the launch flow a shortcut plugs into