I am working on a Android application which is using webview as the main UI. (I don't use Cordova in this project.) The problem of the webview is that it gives different behaviors on running on different android devices. Some devices don't support latest features of javascript or css. In order to unify them I am looking for a solution to embed a webview inside my android application. I see crosswalk may be a good solution for me to choose. But I am not sure whether it is the best one. Is there any other frameworks support the same solution? My requirement is described below:
The current android project is created under Android Studio and use gradle to build the application. I want to keep that when using embed webview.
the solution should not require a lot of structure changes on my android application.
It could run on most of android devices. Ideally support android 4.4 and above.
The embed webview can be easily enabled/disabled.
Related
This is not my first hybrid app (I've published apps on both Google Play Store and Apple Store). My target platform is Android. I'm not sure which versions will be supported, I will determine that later if I decide to publish this idea at all.. I'm using Phonegap Build.
I'm having some trouble getting the HTML Download attribute of the A element to work. Here's what I have:
<a download href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/11/1397210130748/Spring-Lamb.-Image-shot-2-011.jpg">Lamb</a>
If I remove the download attribute, the image opens in my phonegap app (Android). With it, nothing happens though. Works fine in at least Chrome, too. Any ideas?
#Robbert,
I answer alot of Cordova/Phonegap questions like alot of volunteers on this forum. As such, you might find this FAQ useful.
Top Mistakes by Developers new to Cordova/Phonegap
From this FAQ, you want to be aware of #5 - Phonegap is not a webserver or a webbrowser. This is common mistake. It is true you can use your webbrowser to test you pages, but don't be fooled into thinking that all webbrowsers are the same. As Paul Irish likes to remind use "Not all webbrowser are equal". His article Webkit for Developers is a good read.
I quote
Different ports can have different focuses. The Mac port’s focus is split between Browser and OS, and introduces Obj-C and C++ bindings to embed the renderer into native applications. Chromium’s focus is purely on the browser. QtWebKit offers its port for applications to use as a runtime or rendering engine within its cross-platform GUI application architecture.
To be clear, Phonegap uses a library called webview (with Android, and similar on other platforms). The current incarnation is based on Chromium's "webkit", but previously it was based on an old version of Android "webview" - which was around for years. However, even with the attribute you are looking for may not be available.
The best was place to start is caniuse.com. A search for download shows that download is mostly supported, but missing is IE, Safari, and Opera. Otherwise, it appears it is available, but only for Android after 4.4. Looking at my notes this appears to coincide with Android starting to use Chromium's webkit, and not the dated webview library — as i stated before.
Possible Solutions
As #jcesarmobile alluded to you can use
cordova-plugin-file-transfer
_OR_
You can try another webview library that might have the attribute you are looking for
- like crosswalk.
At this time, crosswalk only supports Android, but there are also a few beta version you can also try that are in the repository. And, if your target platform is iOS, then use WKWebview instead.
NOTE the standard webview library is already on your mobile device, crosswalk is separate and will add at least 20megabytes to your app.
I have built a PhoneGap application using the PhoneGap build engine (http://build.phonegap.com).
My problem is, on some devices, the date-picker is automatically available. But on some devices, it doesn't work. I read that every android using device may use a different javascript engine and PhoneGap is using on Android an engine which doesn't support the date-picker.
My questions are
Can I force my application on PhoneGap to use Chrome engine?
if not, which plugin would you recommend and how I can implement a plugin on PhoneGap build
Any other suggestion
thanks.
I have tried using the native widget DatePicker in my PhoneGap application and I gave up, different versions of Android behaves differently. Late versions of Android running the Chrome engine works OK (as you say), but older does not.
If you want true cross-platform across all versions you should probably take a look at the 3rd party PhoneGap plugins:
https://build.phonegap.com/plugins
In my team we are developing an application which is going to be played on tablets, the project has been largely developed and tested on Google Chrome.
At this time we are inserting this webapp on Apache Cordova in order to display it as a native application on Android (and later on iOS), but the app doesn't displays well on the tablet, this because of the WebKit version, which varies on every Android version and does not work as in Chrome.
The question is... There is any way to change the webkit version which operates with Apache Cordova? (or any other web rendering engine)
There is no way at this current time to change the Webkit version used by Apache Cordova - this is because Cordova uses the native Android WebView component, which is based on an old Webkit version. The native Android WebView is quickly becoming the IE 6 of the mobile world, if it isn't already.
EDIT WHOOO! Android 4.4 announced that the default WebView will now be built on top of Chromium! This means that Cordova apps running on Android 4.4 should run much faster (new JS engine) and support more features (HTML5 things.) There is still a lot of confusion around this new WebView and what it means. The best article I have read so far is here: http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/android-4-4-kitkat-browser-chrome-webview
A lot of people have realized that this is becoming a big problem with Cordova apps. There has been some experimental work to build a version of WebView that uses the Chromium source (and thus an updated version of Webkit (Blink?)), you can view the code here: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview Check out the "issues" tab and follow it; I've been getting a few emails every week from people filing issues. I think some forks are ahead of others and hopefully they are getting close. (According to Cordova mailing list archives, Opera was able to get this working on 2.2 but I can't find any code or anything more than a passing reference.)
If you are able to get WebView built with Chromium, it shouldn't be that difficult to switch out which WebView class Cordova uses; I'm pretty sure this ability was already added to Cordova with this and similar commits: https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=cordova-android.git;a=commit;h=f6049881
I think a lot of people are holding their breath that Android 5.0 will finally have an updated WebView that uses Chromium source and will be updated in sync with Chromium... if so, that'll be awesome, but it still leaves us with 4.0 and below that doesn't seem to work at all.
I'd suggest checking out CrossWalk. It's developed by Intel and uses the Blink rendering engine (same as chrome). You package it with your cordova app and then you can use same the Web rendering engine across all devices and versions 4.0+.
https://crosswalk-project.org/
Note: It adds about 20MB to your app's size, but I'd say that's minor for the headaches it would save you in cross device/version testing that you'd have to do.
Check out here to get started with crosswalk and cordova..
https://github.com/crosswalk-project/crosswalk-website/wiki/Create-Sample-App-With-Crosswalk-Cordova-Android
With the release of Apache Cordova Android 4.0.0, it supports "pluggable WebViews".
So, using Crosswalk with Cordova is just matter of installing the cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview.
My questions is :
1 -- Is it possible to have a WebView( Provided by Native framework) instance in my Native App , and extend it to support Webrtc,
if 1 is Yes, then probably following would be the action Item
1 -- Have a webrtc build on Android, 2 -- In Android WebView extend Javascript to couple / bind the Webrtc call,
Please confirm..
What i am trying to do is
1 -- We have webrtc based Voice / Video chat application working fine in Chrome & Mozilla desktop Browser, as both comes with webrtc... , i.e. user need to access www.xyz.com and it will start video / voice sessions,
2 -- same thing on mobile, we would like to go as a native app, i.e. we are trying to make an application, which will have native WebView instance, in which we will access www.xyz.com to have voice / video session
3 -- I tried the way i explained in 2 but it seems, in WebView instance provided by Application framework doesn't have webrtc enabled in it, so i am trying to add it and this is what i am thinking,
-- WebView instance has some mechanism to extend the Javascript , that means
http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html
some of these API i need to add into the WebView, and for their implementation will come if i am able to successfully integrate and build Webrtc over android and iOS Platform
Please comment....
If you want to use webRTC in a Native App, i've built a small android app (https://github.com/pchab/AndroidRTC) that share the back camera to a nodeJS server (https://github.com/pchab/ProjectRTC).
I found that the easiest way to use the libjingle library is with IntelliJ IDEA. I've had a lot of problems with Eclipse and Android Studio.
You're going to have a hard time with the WebView, although it's coming on (newer) Android at least. Nothing on the horizon for iOS.
If you want complete native, you can check out what we've done # FM with IceLink, sounds like it might work for you.
Android WebView does not support WebRTC APIs at this point.
Work is underway on Java an Objective-C bindings, though that may not solve your problem.
With Android L release this should be possible by using just the Android WebView, more below :
http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-5.0.html#WebView
I know this question is kinda old, but I find crosswalk (https://crosswalk-project.org/) to be a pretty good solution for using WebRTC inside of an Android app. What crosswalk do, is compiling a chromium browser into an Android app and hosting your site inside of this chromium, so you will have support for the latest browser features, like WebRTC.
I'm building a native app with a webview and webrtc video inside.
So generally it is possible to build such application and nowadays chromium (webview) have a official support https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/webview/overview , but I have faced really a lot of problem during writing that application.
Few problems are:
Support for phones and os version - I have android 5.1.1 (xperia m2) and after a lot of problems webrtc is running. On android 6 (xperia z5 compact) is not working.. On other phones is sometimes working sometimes not...
You can not be sure, how webview will work - today webrtc is working, but tommorow Google can add some security rule, and it will not work- it's a little bit unstable, and as I have seen, some things depend on os compilation. WebView can get update from store independently of os.
PERMISSIONS - there are a lot of stupid problems, based on the fact that is it a browser inside native app, like - you can't expect a permission question from webview, you have to implement it in android webview config, and in some android versions it is working- in others not :-)
Still a lot of problems of 'young product' - example is that nowadays webview has some issue with devices info display (like camera is front or back) so you have to find a workaround for such problem
Bad video quality - currently my problem is a quality of video- nice quality of video on phone, below maximum resources consumed (cpu, network, memory) and video on computer is really poor...
...and many more
So the fact is - yes this is possible, but it's still not good enough to use it without facing a lot of problems which are not so easy to solve.
You can actually go native with html5 features. So if you use Crosswalk as someone mentioned before, but if you are really set against using: Crosswalk/Ionic/Angular/Cordova (which is awesome), you can still use Crosswalk in a native environment to replace inconsistent and feature lacking WebViews with 1 single, full WebRTC compatible WebView based on the Blink Engine.
I remember reading a few guides on how to get Crosswalk going in Android Studio, here's one I quickly searched, but just Google around there's a bunch of them.
https://www.snip2code.com/Snippet/34721/How-to-use-CrossWalk-runtime-within-an-A
For our Android app, we would like to embed our own browser/rendering engine. The most likely candidate for this, is Webkit/Chromium. We are looking for something similar to WebView, essentially, but backed by a browser (version) that we control.
Background
Significant parts of our app consist of web page fragments embedded in the view (served by the app itself). We try to do this as transparently as possible (from a visual/user experience standpoint). So far, we have been using WebView for this and that works for the most part. Except when it doesn't.
Some phone vendors have unfortunately decided to tweak the standard Android browser here and there. In some cases, this breaks our app or makes the fact the we embed a web page more noticeable.
Our Idea
We'd like to have a component similar to WebView but where we control what version of Webkit/Chromium (or some other rendering engine) is being used. It wouldn't necessarily have to be the latest and greatest version. It is more important that we can get our app to work consistently across as many Android devices as possible.
So far
Our research so far has not turned up anything useful. We have found three dead attempts to port Webkit to NDK (the bare Webkit for Android port uses functionality not available in the NDK and thus not to app developers):
Webkit Android port by Company 100 (no updates for over two years)
mogo-browser (their last revision was to delete all source code)
NDK Webkit (officially abandoned by its author)
Looking on StackOverflow, we have also found a number of similar questions, most of which being solved by pointing to WebView (we already do that, and it's not good enough)
Webkit component for Android
Embed basic WebKit + V8 in my app
Embedding a newer version of WebKit with Android app
We are currently investigating whether Chromium for Android (or parts of it) can be turned into a library that our app could use. Has anyone else done this?
Update
After having a look at the chromeview project on GitHub (accepted answer), we decided that we'd rather wait for Google to release a Chrome-based WebView on future Android devices. The Chromium rendering engine turns out to be fairly large (~40MB), which doesn't leave much space for the actual app :(
pwnall/chromeview · GitHub
https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview
ChromeView works like Android's WebView, but is backed by the latest Chromium code.
You should all check out the Crosswalk project. Sponsored by Intel, and in active development. They pull the Chromium sources and promise to make all new Chromium features available in Crosswalk within 6 weeks.
Crosswalk is a web runtime for ambitious HTML5 applications. It provides all the features of a modern browser, combined with deep device integration and an API for adding native extensions. It is especially suited to mobile devices.
Crosswalk supports Android 4.0 and newer, on ARM and Intel architectures.
Within in one hour of finding this project, I had my Cordova/Phonegap app running on an Android phone with Crosswalk. I'm glad I don't have to adjust my Javascript code to respect the shortcomings of the (pre-4.4) android.webkit.WebView.
https://crosswalk-project.org
Without WebKit there is a GeckoView. Sure it adds over 20Mb of libs to the project.
Nowadays, GeckoView seems an alternative to consider
I tried to use lastest code version of Chromium to build a custom WebView and it's successful.
I will give my approach but not the source code here right now.
Eventually, the size of custom WebView library is about 30MB, quite big for some small app. But it's wonderful because can support perfectly from Android 4.0.
This below is my method:
fetch source code of chromium and build web_view_apk (AndroidWebView test shell) follow this instruction https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/android-build-instructions
use apktool to decompile the apk file of Aw Shell above. https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/
create your project with res, lib folder as same as decompiled project.
Manifest file is located in /src/android_webview/test/src/org/chromium/shell
src folder: you find the classes in chromium project source code which are respective the files in smali folder of decompiled project.
I will update my code later, but you can try my guide now if don't want to wait.
I would consider Chrome custom tabs:
https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs