We have link functionality in our web application that when clicked, browses to a page on our server that performs the following:
Tries to open the custom url to our ios application
If this fails, it redirects the user to our ios app store to download the app.
This actually all works perfectly well.
However, it creates a weird corner case, where after a user has done this and finished, if they come back sometime later and open their safari on the same phone, if our web link is still the active tab, it will redirect them again to our application.
The cause of this is fairly obvious, but we are struggling to come up with a solution for it. Is there any known to rectify this behavior, either through a different mechanism then I described for opening the application or through somehow killing the page simultaneously?
Related
I am working on project where I have been implementing deep linking from app/browser to my app. I have everything setup and it has been working as expected.
But recently, there is changed to the other app where there is new url introduced, which is launching in the browser and that url has changed to exiting url. But it is not launching my app. How to implement and launch my app with that change?
Example
--> deep link url, https://www.externalApp.com/requestPage=homePage&id=4444
--> When user tap on button on the external app, the above URL is invoke and launch the my app.
After change
--> Now new url, http://www.externalApp.com/request=sometoken
--> when user tap on button, http://www.externalApp.com/request=sometoken invoke and open browser and then become https://www.externalApp.com/requestPage=homePage&id=4444 in the browser. But it is staying in the browser and not opening my app.
Expectation is to launch app after url become https://www.externalApp.com/requestPage=homePage&id=4444.
Please help and advise.
A URL redirect will not trigger your app deeplink under any circumstance.
The ideal way to do this would be for your app to handle the URL http://www.externalApp.com/request=sometoken and convert it into https://www.externalApp.com/requestPage=homePage&id=4444 using whatever logic you are currently executing server-side (or on the webpage).
If this is not possible in any way, then the discussion goes into the direction of ugly hacks where you try to trigger the deeplink using Javscript, which can fail (since you cannot guarantee that the deeplinked app is present on the device). I would not delve into those pathways here and recommend you re-think your solution.
Please note that I do not mean to disparage or deride your implementation in any way. You may have a valid use-case where such a flow is required. But with how universal links work on iOS, the above is my recommendation based on my experience as a developer.
Background:
We are building a React Native app which allows users to create posts that include a quote from a blog post or news article. To achieve this, we have built a share extension, which displays a React Native view inside a modal. Inside the RN view we are using react-native-webview (which renders as a WKWebView on iOS), to display the page that was shared, allowing the user to select some text on the page (which is fed back to our app via an injected content script), and continue to create a post.
The problem:
Some news sites that our users want to share from have paywalls, e.g. FT, NY Times etc. - on these sites the user has to log in inside the webview. It's not ideal, but once they have logged in, as we have cookies enabled on the webview, their session will be remembered. This solution works well on Android, and works well on iOS when sharing from Safari.
When sharing from an app on iOS however, once the user submits the login form inside the webview, the share extension closes, taking the user back to the app that initiated the share action.
Here is a video demonstration of the issue occurring in the Guardian app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFnh1x3j4xs
Observations:
When observing requests that occur within the webview using the onShouldStartLoadWithRequest prop of the WebView component, upon submitting the login form, there are two requests where iOS reports the navigationType as formSubmitted.
By checking the navigationType inside of the onShouldStartLoadWithRequest method, I was able to allow the first formSubmitted request to go through, but cancel the subsequent one. This prevented the share extension from closing, but upon clicking a link to go back to the home page, the share extension was closed.
My current theory is that the app which initiates the share, is somehow hooking into the form submit event, as these apps generally use webviews for their own login process - so although this webview is running in our own process, perhaps the app still somehow hooks into the process.
It is worth noting that this behaviour is inconsistent between news apps, presumably due to differences in the way they handle their login process.
Initially this issue was occurring in the BBC app as well, but at some point stopped occurring without us making any changes, so it is somewhat intermittent, or perhaps based on stored data/cookies.
Summary
We would like to fully understand why this behaviour occurs, and we're hoping there is a solution or workaround that will prevent the share extension from closing when the login form is submitted.
I am creating a phonegap application that posts the login information to my website. When user signs off I want to come back to my app. Do I just send the url location along with the post data so that I can come back? or there is another elegant way?
Also when user clicks on the iphone home button, I want the application to exit. Currently it just saves the session and the page and goes back directly to the page if I start the application again.
I am using adobe phonegap site to build and test the application
From your description, I assume that you are navigating the Phonegap WebView (which is running your app) to the URL of your website?
If so, at this point you no longer have an app to navigate back to - the WebView has lost its handle on your app. In order to "navigate back" to your app, you should use the InAppBrowser plugin to navigate to your website. This will allow you to return to your app after the user logs out from your website. You'll need to somehow communicate the logout from your website in the InAppBrowser WebView to your app in its WebView. You may be able to achieve this with cross window messaging.
You can't "exit" an app in iOS - the OS does not allow you to do this. The best you can do is use the resume event to detect when your app has been restored from the background, then manually reset your app to its initial state.
I have an application built using XPages' mobile controls. On an ipHone the application behaves as I would like in the standard Safari browser. When I take the url and add it to the Home Page as an icon and use the application from there every time an action I take invokes a native application (Maps, Contacts, Phone, attachment viewers etc.) when I switch back to my application I am immediately asked for my userid and password again. Is there a way to control the behavior to not lose the login credentials the same way that the standard Safari application seems to.
This is a limitation in iOS. If you save it to the home page like that it works, but it will NOT multi-task. That's the problem. So it doesn't remember where you were or anything like that.
As David mentions it starts all over again when you switch back.... The problem is not only the credentials - it is also all the information you may have entered or where you have navigated to in the "app".
This is why I am changing to another approach. I am starting to write apps as web-apps that run locally (i.e. cache the ressources and run on the cached versions of the JS-files, CSS and images). Then I implement a localstorage where you can track where in the app you are - and return to that place again. This way you do not need the authentication for running the app - only for synchronizing the information with the server. My approach is to save data locally and sync them to the server (as a sort of replication). This obviously gives more work - but it also gives a better user experience since you can run the "app" without being connected.
I have tried to control the caching locally using a cache.manifest file. This can be done, however, it is a pain. Therefore, I am now using Sencha Touch which really does this nicely.
/John
PS. I think you may be able to handle the login issue by using the XPage Dojo login custom control (http://www.openntf.org/internal/home.nsf/project.xsp?action=openDocument&name=Xpages%20Dojo%20Login%20Custom%20Control) - however, it does not solve the issue with reloading the page...
It seems the secret to success here is NOT to tell Safari the XPage is capable of acting as a mobile web app. Add the following code inside for the XPage to ensure this is the case.
<xp:metaData
name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable"
content="no">
</xp:metaData>
Note: You can still provide an icon for the home screen, its just that icon will now act more like a bookmark with the Safari controls and (more importantly) you can switch between applications and when you return to Safari it will display your Xpages app just as you left it.
I've got (actually my employer has) a mobile website that enables Safari integration (for iPhones and iPads) - meaning that customers can bookmark it to their home screen and then it would behave as a standalone web app (no address bar, custom icon, start-up image etc).
It works all right except that one week ago (coincidentally soon after apple has released iOS 6.1.2) some of our customers (6 of them initially) complained that they no longer get the normal content but a '404 page' of a public wifi provider (The Cloud owned by Sky here in the UK). After a bit of investigation we've figured that at some point those customers connected to the Cloud wifi without actually logging in (it's one of those providers that would redirect you to a login page to enter your credentials, after which you can carry on browsing). The thing is that even after switching back to their private wifi or mobile data connection the application would display the Cloud's page.
This only happens (as far as I can tell) when the application is launched via the bookmark (I couldn't see this behavior when using it from safari).
What happens is that the customers would connect to the cloud wifi (without logging in), they would open the application at which point the router will issue a redirect response to their login page; the application would cache the login page and it will always display it whenever using the bookmark again. (I've performed a capture when this happens and there are no requests being made at start-up whatsoever).
Even weirder, in this situation, if removing the existing bookmark and adding a new one will show you the same cached page (with the whole operation being performed away from the Cloud). We've fixed this by adding a unique identifier to the URL each time we hit the bookmark screen (this indicates that the web apps' sandboxes are linked to the url, which is to be expected).
What we're trying to achieve is to have the application properly recovering after the customer has moved away from the Cloud. But there doesn't seem to be a straight forward way to do this.
Furthermore there's a level of inconsistency in all of this - most of the times when the flow is performed I will see a 404 page (a custom 404 page https://service.thecloud.net/service-platform), but sometimes I would be properly redirected to the login page, in which case the application would not break.
My assumption is that there is a weird race condition in the standalone web app application model causing the browser not to properly handle redirects (and actually caching 404 pages). I've raised a support incident with Apple (which eventually turned into a bug report) but it might take a while and I'm trying my best to figure out a workaround.
Any ideas, maybe someone has seen this before?
The issue is aggravated by the fact that I need to have a 5 minutes walk ever time I'm testing any fixes; I've tried creating simple test forms, but I wasn't able to reproduce the issue, where as with the full app I can do it pretty much every time.
Here's a summary of the steps to reproduce:
Via private wifi (or mobile data connection) add a bookmark to a website (I've managed to reproduce it with quite a couple of apps that support safari integration as described above)
Open the application to review the normal content
Connect to a Cloud hotspot and open the application from the bookmark (open-close it for a couple of times if you don't get the 404 right away)
Connect to the private wifi (or mobile data connection) and open the application via the bookmark -> you'll see the same 404 page again
In the end the fix was to add a unique query string parameter with the initial page request (pretty easy with the setup we already had, via the launcher page). I've filed a bug report with Apple which they've acknowledged by linking it to a previous item. Here's a post on the topic:
http://blog.onos.ro/ios-6.1.2-caching-issue