I'm using Universal links and everything is working perfectly but I can't seem to hide the Open in app banner which shows in the safari. Is there any way to do this?
There's nothing you can do about that really, it's a feature of Universal Links and gets injected automatically by Safari.
Usually, they're hidden until you overscroll the content.
What goal you are trying to achieve by using Universal Links?
Usually developers are using Universal Links if they want for all/part of the website to be viewable in the App. From this point of view, screenshot you posted is a failure, because Universal Links failed to engage. Possible reasons can be if navigation to the Universal Links domains happened as redirect.
If there are specific pages on your website that you don't want become viewable in the App, you can use exclusions list in associated domain file. Check out this example http://amazon.com/apple-app-site-association . In this case navigating to the "/ref=nodl_" will not open the Amazon and will not show the banner you are mentioning.
Hey you can hide the smart banner by edit your apple-app-association file in the root directory of your website. You can control the banner on the pages you want to show.
you cannot hide the banner while using the universal links at the same time.
You can only hide the banner where you do not want the universal links to work by restricting the paths in apple-app-association file.
If you want to hide the banner form all the pages just add
"paths":["NOT /*"] in details object in this case universal links will not work.
Related
I have a iOS app that wraps a website. When the user clicks a link in the wrapped website, I want to trap the event in my app and be able to get information about the link that was clicked. Is this something that can be done in Swift?
I'm relatively new to iOS app development and I'm working on an app that has been around for a while.
The short answer is "Yes". There are a couple of views that you can use in iOS to display web content. One such view is WKWebView.
If you look at the documentation at that link, close to the bottom of the page you will find a header for "Managing Navigation Through your Web Content".
What you do is create a WKNavigationDelegate that you attach to your WKWebView. That delegate is notified when the user wants to navigate through the web content (for example, when they click on a link) and lets your application code participate in the navigation process. It can allow navigation, deny navigation, find out when it starts and stop, things of that nature.
I have a PWA saved on the home screen, this opens up standardly without search bar nor the bottom buttons (share, tabs, etc..).
So every link gets opened inside the PWA, and that is expected.
I have a problem when showing pdfs as they normally open in Safari with the "share" button and all the bottom bar, but in the PWA they open up without bottom bar and without any share button.
So my idea is to open the PDF link (http://www.mywebsite.com/download/pdf/12345) in a new safari window,.
I tried putting target="_blank" on the PDF link but this did not solve the problem.
I also tried forcing the iOS behavior by opening the app in safari with safari://http://www.mywebsite.com/download/pdf/12345 but with no luck.
How do I open a New Safari window to a link?
OK, the ONLY working solution is to tell iOS you are going onto another domain.
PWA stays in your app frame ONLY if you stay in the same domain.
To open a link within your domain in an EXTERNAL window (or inside the PWA but with Safari standard controls) you have to send it to an external/different domain.
So the PWA is on https://www.mywebsite.com/ and you want to open a PDF with all Safari control buttons, you just create a SUB domain and point the link to it, like https://media.mywebsite.com/download/pdf/12345 at this point the PWA thinks you are on a different domain and does the correct rendering! 🎉
You can try to use window.open(url).
But, remember to put it in an element with onclick event attribute.
For example,
<button class='btn' onclick='window.open("https://www.google.com", "_blank");'>Open Google search</button>
Reference: window.open(url, '_blank'); not working on iMac/Safari
EDIT
You can set a scope in manifest.json to customize where to open an external link.
You can refer https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-app-manifest on the property scope.
There seem te be some subtle differences in the Implementation or configuration between WBWebView and Safari (and SFSafariViewController) that renders a part of the Website I want to display unusable.
Here is what I am trying to do:
Basically all that is needed is an "App" that just opens a specific website in fullscreen mode, so no chrome, URLs or additional navigaton buttons are present. The Website works fine on Safari on iOS (and every other (modern) browser on desktop or mobile) but the menu does not when embedded in the App.
All I did was creating a new single view Application in Xcode, drop in a WKWebView and have it load the URL. The part of the page not working is this menu component that is used throughout the site: http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/04/19/responsive-multi-level-menu/ So basically the user has no way to navigate. While debugging the website it seems like when I push the menu button the menu does not expand like it should because the changed css classes dont get picked up correctly. If I manually toggle the css classes on the menu-element it gets displayed correctly. It makes me wonder if there are some additonal constraints related to WKWebView?
Can anyone tell me if there are any settings or configurations I can alter that allow the website in WKWebView to behave exactly the same as it would under Safari?
As far as I understand SFSafariViewController I always get the browser toolbar and navigational elements which I dont want to have in the app, so that is not an option- or is there a way to get rid of that?
Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated :)
Before anyone marks this question as a duplicate please read the extra section at the bottom that sites differences between this question and other similar questions out there
I'm utilizing Universal Links for my deep linking needs. Two example use cases are:
1.) Safari/Chrome Browser on iPhone with my app installed: When click on a link on my web site on their iPhone I'm deep linking them into my app if installed on their phone.
2.) With my app installed, running my app but using an in-app-UIWebView. My app also has an in-app UIWebView, when you tap a button it deep links them somewhere in the application.
After you deep link into the app, there are two buttons in the navigation bar. A Back button (top left) and a Forward button (top right).
My problem
If the user presses the forward button (top right) it forwards them to my web page and then will forever break my deep linking so that any time in the future when the user clicks on that link to deep link it always goes to my web page instead of deep linking into the app (which was the original intention). How can I prevent this? My concern here is that my app has close buttons in the top right corner and if the user is trying to hit hte close button they could accidentally hit the forward button and forever break deep linking. I've tried clearing my browsers caches, I've tried deleting and re-installing my app. But nothing will "fix" deep linking after it's been permanently disabled by the forward button. The only way I can get it working again is by doing a complete device reset and Erasing all Content and Settings.
Here is an image of the back and forward buttons after deep linking into the application.
Difference between my question and similar questions on SO:
Similar SO question But here they are saying that the user can long-press on the "universal link" and and action sheet pops up asking you to "open in ". I've tried this for above case 1.) and my app isn't showing up in the options. See attached screenshot below. And this doesn't work at all for above case 2.). How do you get a Universal link to work with an iOS WebViewController? Do I have to use the SafariViewController? I don't want to use SafariViewController in my app for this case because I don't want to have that top navigation bar that SafariViewController has.
You're absolutely right: the forward button is horrible UI/UX. It's one of the big flaws with Universal Links identified in this blog post. There is no way to disable the forward button, and once it's triggered, you're screwed.
The easiest way to re-enable Universal Linking behavior after it is turned off is to long-press on the link. But that doesn't work if your link is being disabled by the system based on some other criteria (more details below). Your best bet at getting a clean shot is to paste the Universal Link URL into the stock Notes app and try long-pressing it from there.
To answer a few of your other questions:
Universal Links do work within UIWebView (per Apple's docs). A SafariViewController is not necessary.
Universal Links are disabled at the system level in certain situations. There's a list here, but this the main one that comes to mind as potentially applicable in this situation:
Universal Links will not work with a user driven element click on the same domain. Example: if there is a Universal Link on google.com pointing to a different Universal Link on google.com, it will not open the app.
Your second example image is from Chrome. Universal Links should work (conditionally) in Chrome, but is the link pointing at the same domain as the page you've already loaded? If so, that's why you aren't seeing the Open in [app] option.
You cannot disable the button to open the website, but you can create a path in the other direction: Use a smart banner on the website, and when users tap "Open" (or the localized equivalent), they will be taken back to your app, and this will also reset the default to opening universal links in your app instead of Safari.
I'm building an iOS app using cordova that basically opens news links to external sites. However iFrames don't seem to want to play nice on iOS. Is it possible to use UIWebView much like an iframe? I want to just embed a box on my app page so I can keep my apps header navigation and such. Instead right now opening links just pops the page up over everything.