I've been doing lots of work in getting a few web apps to work offline on iOS using the HTML5 manifest. I've ran across the typical problems everyone else has and fixed them and everything seems to be working fine—except in the case where I save the web app to the desktop on my iPhone 4.
If I do this and then enable airplane mode, I get the following alert when trying to access the app via the home screen: "your-app-name could not be opened because its not connected to the internet." Accessing the app via Safari browser works fine while offline.
If anyone knows if this is an error on my part, or even the slim possibility of a work around, do tell.
Even downloading the new Financial Times web app (very well done with extensive localStorage support) results in an error when accessing it offline from the home screen.
Technical specs: Running iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3.3 (but also saw the issue in 4.3.2)
After reading the comments (especially Rowan's) I ran more tests and found the answer:
No, Apple did not disable HTML5 offline capability for web apps saved to the home screen, it works - for the most part. There is a bug that will make it not work. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with your manifest setup (unless perhaps it downloaded a bad manifest or incomplete manifest at one point.) We don't know how widespread it is but the fix is to clear your Mobile Safari Cache.
Here's the steps:
Close the web app (make sure its not sticking around in the background).
Cleared Mobile Safari cache: Settings > Safari > Clear Cache
Reopened the app (for caching).
Close the web app again (make sure its not sticking around in the background).
Enabled "Airplane Mode": Settings > Airplane Mode
Reopened the app.
It should now work offline. If it doesn't then its probably a separate manifest issue in your app. Looks like a weird bug with the browser cache - or perhaps the cache was completely full? Who knows, but that's the answer. Thanks guys.
iOS seems to be very sensitive to load issues when offline.
I was getting your "could not be opened" error when offline on a page I was working on. The problem turned out to be that the page created an iframe pointing to a site that didn't have an AppCache. Removing those iframes fixed the issue.
In my case, I handled it using window.navigator.standalone which tells you whether you're running in an iOS homescreen app. The code looked like this:
if (!navigator.standalone) insertFrames();
add this to your html:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201180939/https://jonathanstark.com/blog/debugging-html-5-offline-application-cache?filename=2009/09/27/debugging-html-5-offline-application-cache/
I found it massively useful - even though I've created my manifest file and compared it to other people's manifests this JavaScript debugging script gave me the clue I would have never found otherwise. I apparently had syntax error in my manifest ... long story short I had to remove everything and add the paths to each file/image one by one. The end result was the same however it worked... how weird!!! does whitespace / comments affect the syntax of the file?
Related
In my current MEAN stack project, everything functions fine on desktop Safari, Chrome, and mobile Chrome, but in mobile Safari for iOS, data-binding shows as text (e.g. {{data.total}} as opposed to $25). To make matters worse, when I open the app from iOS Safari served from localhost, it also works properly.
I've tried rolling back my Heroku app and the problem persists, even when I go back to a version from when I'm sure it looked good on an iPhone. I've checked it out on others' iPhones, and gotten the same negative result. I can't find this problem elsewhere on the internet, nor am I sure what I should be looking for as the problem seems to be with Heroku or iOS.
Here's the live page: http://minneapolish3-beta.herokuapp.com/reddress. This has me very much stumped, but I'm pretty green. If you find it not working on other platforms, I'd love to know about that as well.
(Naturally, I can't well spin up a CodePen example as the problem is only occurring in the wild.)
A friend introduced me to the Safari Web Inspector for mobile which allwed me to see warnings, alerts, etc.
It turns out that my Google Maps API call, via http://, was causing the page to break on mobile Safari. When I changed it to https:// everything worked! Thanks go to Bonus Kun whose answer to another question helped expedite my solution.
I can't seem to find an answer to this seemingly simple question. I have an app that i've built using the command line phonegap tools and when i start this app it opens up. i am using something called ios_sim (https://github.com/phonegap/ios-sim) which launches the app in the simulator and does not launch xCode (i don't quite understand why this is a feature, it seems like xCode has some useful tools)
Anyhow, my app is not functioning the same way that it does in the browser and i need to debug it. I have also already installed Charles to inspect the requests and i can verify that the correct data is coming from my API so my assumption is that there is some sort of javascript error in rendering the page (the page is partially rendered btw).
All i want to do is view the javascript errors. the same way that you would in the console if you were looking at a web page.
how do you do that?
You have to use Safari Remote Debugging with Web Inspector. See in the relating cordova docs how to do that!
I have run into several problems with iOS development through phonegap recently, and unusually people around here have been unable to discuss these issues and even together we have (for the first time I have ever seen) not had a single comment or answer for these topics...
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14707936/make-a-page-that-redirects-back-to-ios-phonegap-app and iOS broswer data -> Cache & Cookie for Phonegap App / Session?...
However, I have found "solutions" to get around these, but its by no means answers to the issues in question which are still outstanding... just simply doing it a completely different way.
However, despite loosing web-view in phonegap, in an attempt to get around https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14707936/make-a-page-that-redirects-back-to-ios-phonegap-app I now have some issue that are outstanding...
I need to be able to navigate back to my App from the web-system !!!
However, I have no idea how. I have read info on creating URL Schema, but I am not sure if this is even possible through build.phonegap at all... and it seems faily complicated. Does anybody know of a way for iOS safari to do one of two things
Either
Open the app that is running in the background
or
close the current browser tab and navigate back to the app in the background.
The closing tab idea would be good, but not essential
Look forward to everyone thoughts and opinions on this one...
Henry
You can create an url scheme for any application you make yourself.
See tutorial here
It's not as terribly complicated as one would think, and the required objective-c code is minimal.
Once you have done this, you can use your own url scheme to launch your phonegap application from safari with a hyperlink.
This would not close the tab (you could do this with javascript if you wanted to)
but does put safari in the background, and opens your phonegap app.
(whether it is already running in the background or not)
It is even possible to pass data to the app using your url scheme.
It is not currently possible using PhoneGap Build in 2.2 and previous. Potentially a feature top be released in newer versions of Cordova/Phonegap
I'm having a very strange issue with my web app (which is ran in full-screen mode from the home screen) and Mobile Safari. Usually, as I develop, I edit the files with the changes that I want to make and then I re-launch the app from the homescreen. As per iOS design, the web app will refresh and reload the site.
However, in some odd but frequent situations, when I launch the application I get a cached older version of the app. If I navigate to the app through Mobile Safari (not from home screen) then everything looks great.
I've added meta no cache tags all over the space and even attempted to thwart the cache by adding ?query strings to .css files, etc, but for some odd reason when a cached version decides it wants to display - it will display, no matter what. Clearing cache and data from the settings menu and then relaunching will only sometimes fix the problem.
Anyone else run into this issue? If so, how did you fix it? Is it a known iOS bug? I'm thinking about adding some onLoad code to check if the application is running in full screen mode and then explicitly force a refresh.
Please help - this is extremely annoying and frustrating!
Rich
In my own testing I also found that applications run from the "Home Screen" on iOS won't properly refresh their CSS and JS files. This appears to be an ongoing problem. The only solution that worked for me was to:
Change the device date forward by 2 days or so..
Reload the app from the Home Screen..
Reset the date.
I also tried deleting and recreating the icon from the home screen and clearing the cache in Safari.
"Happily" you are not the only one seeing this problem.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3385843?start=90&tstart=0
Incase anyone asks. There were no manifest files involved in my testing.
iPad 2 with IOS 5.1.1.
Enable Debug console from "Settings>Safari>advance" and see if you've any errors there.
Most probably you may have an 'Invalid MIME type", Manifest Parsing or Resource Fetch Failure Error.
Fix them (this link might help in fixing those http://www.fuckyeahtml5.com/2011/06/debugging-html5s-offline-web-apps/).
I have a ipad. I make a website with html5 application storage. With a manifest file. The manifest is working on the new ipad 2 and all the web browsers. But it is not working on the ipad 2 with a lower ios version.
The problem is. When i loaded the page. The manifest file is caching the website. I turn airplane mode on. Now i can used the website without a internet connection.
But the problem is. When i now reloading the page. I get a error, that i need a internet connection to view the page. How can i fix this. This problem is in safari.
I have been working through similar issue.
I have an iPad 1 so not exactly the same platform, and I know this sounds a bit "did you turn it off and on again" but you need to make completely sure there are absolutely NO errors in your cache manifest. If you are using a file in your app that is not listed in the cache manifest file, your app will try and function without the missing file. This is particularly relevant when using multiple js files. Anything missing (an easy thing to do when you are in rapid development) will crash your app offline.