Put a Screen's Board on an Android Panel with Chrome
How to get the right display URL out of the portal, open it in Chrome on an Android panel, and confirm the screen reports itself as online.
Put a Screen's Board on an Android Panel with Chrome
This article covers the part of the installation that happens on the device: finding the address of the screen you are installing, opening it in Chrome on the Android panel, and checking afterwards that the panel actually reports itself as online. Everything about *what* the board shows — airport, colours, rotation, clock format — is configured in the portal and is not something you set on the device.
Before you start
You need three things. The panel needs a stable network connection, because the board re-reads its configuration every twenty seconds and sends a heartbeat every five minutes; a wired connection is the safer choice where one is available. The panel needs Chrome, which is pre-installed on most Android devices and otherwise comes from the Play Store. And you need the screen already created in the portal, either through the guided setup at Setup or by adding it under Displays, because the address you are about to open only exists once the screen does.
Step 1: Get the URL of this particular screen
A hotel can have several screens, and each one has its own address. Open Displays, open the screen you are installing, and switch to the Preview & URL tab. The Display URL shown there is the one for that screen, and the QR Code for Easy Setup next to it encodes the same address. If you are coming straight out of the guided setup wizard, its last step shows you the same URL and QR code for the screen it just created.
The address has the form https://<your-domain>/display/<hotelId>?display=<displayId>. The ?display= part is what makes it specific, and it matters for two reasons. Only a board opened with a display ID sends heartbeats, so a panel opened without one stays listed in the portal as Never opened forever, even while it is happily showing flights in the lobby. And a bare /display/<hotelId> address does not identify a screen at all, so the board falls back to whichever active screen was edited most recently — which is often not the one hanging on the wall in front of you.
One address to avoid: anything ending in preview=1. That variant exists for the thumbnails inside the portal. It renders a still frame — no rotation, no info slides, no auto-scroll — and deliberately sends no heartbeat. Use the plain display URL from the copy and open actions, not a URL you lifted from the preview frame.
Step 2: Open the URL on the panel
Point the panel's camera at the QR code from Preview & URL and follow the notification it produces. If the camera is unreliable in the lighting where the panel is mounted, open Chrome and type the address into the address bar instead. Either way the board should come up on its own; if it does not, see the troubleshooting section below.
Step 3: Add it to the home screen
With the board open in Chrome, tap the menu (the three dots in the top right corner), choose Add to Home screen, and confirm with Add. You now have an icon that gets the panel back to the board after someone has closed Chrome or after a restart, without anyone having to retype the URL.
Do not expect that icon to give you a borderless board. The home-screen shortcut is a convenience, not a kiosk mode, and the board itself never asks the browser for fullscreen. If you need the panel to run without browser chrome and without a way for guests to navigate away, use a kiosk app.
Step 4: Run it in kiosk mode
For a screen that runs unattended, install Fully Kiosk Browser from the Play Store, enter the display URL as its start URL, and switch on Kiosk Mode. This is the setup the product recommends for permanently mounted panels, and it is what Activate Kiosk Mode for 24/7 Operation describes in detail.
What you set in the portal, not on the device
Two settings look like device settings and are not. The clock on the board is formatted in the timezone of the airport the screen is configured for, so changing the Android date and time settings will not move it. Whether it shows a 24-hour or a 12-hour clock comes from Time Format in the General tab of the display editor. Set both there.
The same tab holds Display Mode, which is worth a moment before you mount the panel. TV Display scrolls and rotates continuously and ignores touch entirely, which is what you want for a screen behind glass or out of reach. Touch Screen adds search and pauses scrolling and rotation for thirty seconds after someone touches it, which suits a panel guests can reach. Website Widget behaves like the touch mode in a compact layout meant for embedding. A touch-capable panel left in TV mode will simply ignore fingers, which is usually a surprise rather than a decision.
Confirming the screen is online
The board sends a heartbeat every five minutes, and the portal treats a screen as offline once twelve minutes have passed without one — two missed beats plus some slack, so that a reload or a brief network hiccup does not raise a false alarm. That also means a freshly installed panel takes a few minutes to change state, and that waiting only five minutes before worrying is too impatient.
On the dashboard and under Displays, each screen reads as Showing when it has reported in recently, Offline when it has gone quiet, Never opened when its URL has not been loaded yet, and Switched off when the screen has been deactivated in the portal, which is a choice rather than a fault. A panel that keeps reading Never opened while the board is visibly running is the classic sign that the URL on the device is missing its ?display= parameter.
How often the flight data itself refreshes depends on the plan: every 60 minutes on Basic, every 30 minutes on Pro, and every 5 minutes on Premium. Say this out loud during a handover, because a Basic screen that has not changed in half an hour is behaving exactly as intended.
When something is wrong
If the board cannot load its configuration at all, it shows a Configuration Error screen reading "Unable to load display configuration" with a Retry button. That is a connectivity or backend problem, not a wrong URL.
A wrong hotel ID fails more quietly: the configuration endpoint answers with a default configuration, so the panel shows a generic board rather than an error. If the board is up but shows nothing you recognise — wrong airport, wrong name, no logo — compare the address on the device against the one in Preview & URL character by character.
There is no pull-to-refresh gesture on the board; it fills the screen and does not scroll under your finger. To force a fresh load, reload the page in the browser or restart the device.
For the network administrator
The panel needs outbound HTTPS on port 443 and DNS on port 53. It contacts your LobbyFlight domain — lobbyflight.com and *.lobbyflight.com for a standard installation — and *.public.blob.vercel-storage.com, which is where hotel logos and info-slide images are served from. Fonts are served from the application itself and need no third-party domain.
If the hotel runs white-label with its own verified domain, the display URL is that domain rather than lobbyflight.com, and the allowlist has to name it. Network Requirements and Firewall Configuration has the full picture.