Why am I getting error for apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png

Question

I have created a new rails3 project but I am seeing following logs many times in my server logs. Why I am getting these request and how can I avoid these?

Started GET "/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png" for 192.168.6.2 at 2012-09-18 20:03:53 +0530

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png"):

I haven't given this link anywhere and don't want to render this image anywhere. I am clueless why this resource is being tried to be loaded.

Answer 1

I guess apple devices make those requests if the device owner adds the site to it. This is the equivalent of the favicon. To resolve, add 2 100×100 png files, save it as apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png and apple-touch-icon.png and upload it to the root directory of the server. After that, the error should be gone.

I noticed lots of requests for apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png and apple-touch-icon.png in the logs that tried to load the images from the root directory of the site. I first thought it was a misconfiguration of the mobile theme and plugin, but found out later that Apple devices make those requests if the device owner adds the site to it.

Source: Why Webmasters Should Analyze Their 404 Error Log (Mar 2012; by Martin Brinkmann)