Develop Reference

Download attribute not working in Phonegap app

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.

Experiences with Intel XDK and Cordova CLI: What is better?

I'm currently planning a cordova app targeting Android, iOS and Windows Phone 8.1. No I'm wondering on which build workflow I should rely on. On the one hand there's builind via the command line interface (CLI) of cordova, on the other one there's Intel XDK (for Linux in my case).
Is thre anyone who has experiences with one or both types and could share his/her knowledge with the community? Are there any bottlenecks with Intel XDK? Is it usable or not worth a try. Is it hard to production-build the app for those 3 platforms on myself (at least android doesn't seem too hard)?
Bye The_Unknown

The question will be flagged shortly, I am sure. :-)
The XDK is pretty good, but is possibly overambitious in some areas. I'd like to see them dump the AppDesigner (GUI builder) portion of it, and focus all efforts on the remainder of the toolset. It is integrated with Crosswalk for Android so it is quite slick for that platform. There is a brand new release of the XDK out in the past couple of days. Their new cloud build service is not building for WP8 right now, so you would need to use the legacy service (which is accessible within the IDE). As a general aside, the team supporting it at Intel is remarkably active on their support forums and appear highly responsive when I've seen production-related issues arise.
A quick comment I would make is that the more your app may depend on "non-core" Phonegap plugins (i.e. not the ones that are part of the Cordova/Phonegap base like Camera or Notification) the more you will be pushed into building the apps for testing rather than doing emulated or on-device debugging in one of the harnesses.
Personally I am taking the approach of using the XDK, but minimizing my reliance on the various XDK plugins when a standard Cordova plugin will work. I figure this way if I need to switch to Cordova or Phonegap Build at some point, the migration should be fairly painless (or at least easy to determine needed changes), while in the meantime I do get some of the niceties the XDK provides.

I have worked with Intel XDK before but i haven't taken a look into it for over half a year so i don't know what updates have been applied to it recently. I have only worked with cordova for an hour or so and my experience with it until then wasn't great to say the least.
In my opinion it's still better to create native platform apps for each platform. It will cost more time and requires more knowledge, but it will give the users all the UX they are used to from their own platform. This will make a more unified experience for users and they will appreciate it. And ofcourse there are endless amounts of tutorials online.
Hope my answer helped you a little

Do 'Chrome Apps for Mobile' use native web-view on each platform?

Is Chrome Apps For Mobile only a collection of Apache Cordova plugins for each mobile platform or does it intend to also replace the native web-view with Chrome based web-view ?
This question and this slide on Google Docs seem to indicate that it is only a collection of plugins. This question says that on iOS it uses the native web-view.
What about on Android and any future platforms Google might support?

Yes, all current Chrome Apps for Mobile using the cca toolkit are cordova based and thus use the Native system WebView.
On iOS, this currently seems unlikely to change because of policy restrictions (but hey, who knows).
On Android, the cordova contributors would like to experiment with supporting the use of custom web renderer implementations. This is being discussed as a possible cordova-4.0 major version bump milestone feature, and would thus target fall/winter of 2014. This is really just a dream at this point, but its certainly a feature that is on everyones mind.
I should note, there are a many downsides to doing this, its not all gravy. Using a custom WebView means adding ~20meg to application download size, and means significantly more memory/video memory usage on device. Alternatively, we could ask users to download a separate "cordova-runtime" app from the store (like Adobe Air for Android, or like you have to download a Java Runtime for desktop), but users usually dislike that experience.
Also, with Android 4.4 KitKat now having a chrome-based WebView, which enabled remote debugging and implements many modern web capabilities, the usefulness of a custom WebView is shrinking.
Finally, there is already a project that does what you ask, but isn't cordova based, and is not used by the cca tool: Intel's Crosswalk Project. Just adding it for reference. Their wiki goes over a lot of tradeoffs with their approach.

Change default webkit on Apache Cordova - Android

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.

Embedded Chromium or Webkit in Android app

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