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iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

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    iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

    I'm wondering if anyone has figured out a work around to the iOS 7 "add to home screen" bug that has a significant impact on mobile app deployment.

    The bug is that all links like "mailto:, tel:, sms:" no longer work when your app is run when launching from an icon added to the home screen. Putting these in javascript doesn't work either.

    The result is that you must instruct your users to run your mobile app in Safari and NOT add an icon to the home screen to launch. If they do your links will not work.

    A little background: we have an application that searches for contact records and the user is able to view the details such as address, phone and email. We of course want them to click to call, text and email as that is what you do on a phone. Simple stuff.

    With iOS 6 they could click on buttons and the respective function would occur. The underlying code used the href="tel:..." syntax and put the phone number as a variable (or text or email). Worked great. Now those links don't work at all.

    Is the only option with AlphaAnywhere to go to PhoneGap and use the native functions? This is a real bummer as the add to home screen feature made our app look and feel more "native". Without it is just another website.

    Thanks in advance, Tracie

    #2
    Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

    Hi Tracie,

    I was not aware of this issue. We encourage our users to create a home screen link to our mobile web site and we also make use of the "tel:" link to open the native phone app. I am using Javascript as opposed to the "href="tel:..." HTML syntax. I will look into this and let you know what I find.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

      iOS 7 add to home screen is very broken, along with a large number of other issues relating to web apps on iOS devices.

      See:http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/bad...of-bugs-227685

      I think there are a number of reasons for this.

      First, Apple seems to have drawn a line in the sand for a ship date of the new iPhones.
      Web apps clearly were not deemed a high priority item.
      Even iOS 7 native apps are having issues.
      I see a LOT of native app crashes on my iPhone 5.

      Next, Apple has a very strict NDA which does not allow developers who receive the pre-releases to compare notes.
      Hence .. a lot of bugs go unreported.
      I spotted a lot of the referenced bugs in the pre-release builds but I figured that they would be fixed prior to FCS.
      That didn't happen.

      I don't think the Mobile Safari team meant to break so much of the supported HTML5 functionality that was built into Mobile Safari running under iOS 6 (which was really good).

      Since iOS 7 FCS, The HTML5 community has done a good job of documenting the issues and reporting the bugs to the Mobile Safari team. Hopefully the majority of them will be fixed ASAP.

      In the meantime, stay clear of adding a startup image in any of your iOS web apps. That seems to cause full iOS hangs on certain devices.

      Another trick that seems to help:

      Remove the "apple-mobile-web-app-capable" meta tag. Then you seem to be able to still add a shortcut to the home screen, which will launch the app in the Mobile Safari browser, not the full screen chrome less browser that you can get if the "apple-mobile-web-app-capable" meta tag is present.

      This of course is not the most desirable deployment mobile web app option.

      The most reliable way to deploy your web app on an iOS 7 device is using PhoneGap.

      PhoneGap has just released version 3 with support for iOS 7.
      The bad news is that the status bar is now part of the UIWebView and will overlay your web app.
      This is by design with iOS 7 as the status bar now becomes part of the view.

      ios7_PhoneGap_StatusBar.png

      There are a couple of solutions to the problem.

      1. If you are building/deploying on your own (NOT USING PhoneGap Build) you can turn off the status bar in the MainViewController.

      From within XCode find the apps Info.plist file in the Resources folder.
      Add the following two keys:

      Code:
      Status bar is initially hidden : Boolean : NO
      View controller-based status bar appearance : Boolean : YES
      This now will allow the view controller to set the visibility of the status bar under iOS 7.

      Now open MainViewController.m and add the following:

      Code:
      // hide view status bar, iOS 7
      -(BOOL) prefersStatusBarHidden {
      	return YES;
      }
      2. Add a 20px top margin to the document body

      This example code will only set the top margin if the device is running iOS 7:

      Code:
      function onDeviceReady() {
          if (parseFloat(window.device.version) === 7.0) {
                document.body.style.marginTop = "20px";
          }
      }
        
      document.addEventListener('deviceready', onDeviceReady, false);
      See:
      ios7_PhoneGap_topMargin20px_statusBar.png

      While Alpha Anywhere fully supports PhoneGap 3.x right now, I am working on a lot of new stuff that will be added to the product to make PhoneGap 3.x integration and deployment as easy as possible so stay tuned. That will include more PhoneGap related doc, tutorials, etc.

      In the meantime, I hope this helps.
      Bob Moore


      Comment


        #4
        Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

        Thanks Bob,

        I've been working with David Kates and he's come up with a solution to this issue. I'll post with the details.

        Question on PhoneGap: do you have any documented code for storing login credentials to the phone? I think PhoneGap is the solution but need a few tips to get it working. Specifically I need to have the phone, either iPhone or Android, prompt and store the username and password when the user first logs in. This works fine in the browser but when I launch via PhoneGap I need the same functionality.

        Thanks,

        Tracie

        Comment


          #5
          Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

          I had the issue of status bar been part of the UIWebView and did overlay my mobile app on iphone and ipad- but this afternoon just by reloading and 'rebuild all' the phonegap with no changes made to the code (without above changes made)- it worked fine?

          Comment


            #6
            Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

            When I launch my app from a home screen web link in iOS 7.04 and then open the phone app, it no longer returns back to the page which opened the phone app. It instead re-launches the home screen web link and I have to log in again. This worked perfectly in iOS 6. I am opening the iOS phone app using the following Javascript in a button onclick event:

            window.location = 'tel:7145551212';

            It works fine in iOS 7.04 as long as I first launch Safari and then go to my web site. I am not having any problems opening the phone app when launching the app form a home screen web link, it's just closing the phone app and returning back to the page which opened it.

            Any suggestions would be much appreciated?

            Comment


              #7
              Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

              I wanted to add a saved safari home screen image for apple devices. Can this be done? I just updated to IOS 8.4.1

              Comment


                #8
                Re: iOS 7 and "add to home screen" bug

                Solved this one pretty easily. You create an icon. I used an app store app, that helps you with the size for different purposes. You name the image apple-touch-icon.png, add it to your project, publish it. Bam!
                It worked!

                Comment

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