Looking to check a site on a Samsung Galaxy, what browser does it use out the box and where can I emulate it - either online or on OSX?
Reason I am asking is a few CSS properties do not work and need to find a fix.
The Browser app that is present on TouchWiz (Galaxy) devices is not the stock Android (AOSP) Browser. The Samsung Browser has customizations on top of the stock browser (such as the functionality for OS/Browser-controlled elements i.e. select fields).
The bad news is that it is difficult to recreate these issues without having a TouchWiz/Galaxy device in hand. While you can create an Android Virtual Device using the SDK to test the Browser, you may find that the controls are somewhat different than what are present in the TouchWiz browser.
There are apks of the Samsung Browser app out there, but they need to replace the existing stock browser in your device's system directory, which requires root access.
Related
I want to be able to open links in my app with chrome custom tab will that still work if the user doesn't have chrome or will it crash my app.
I tried to uninstall Chrome from my phone(i use my phone for testing) but I can't unless I root my phone which I don't want to.
Is it possible for android to ship without the chrome browser.
You can disable Chrome to emulate it not being installed: https://support.google.com/android/answer/2521768?hl=en-GB. There's not need to root the phone.
Many browsers, including Edge, Firefox and Samsung Internet support the Custom Tabs protocol, so your app should still be able to use Custom Tabs, as long as one of the browsers that support it is installed.
I'm trying to turn my PWA (Progressive web Application) into an TWA (Trusted Web Acitivity) App for Android. In the beginning everything was working fine, until a user reported a problem to me.
He was unable to open the App at all, so we checked to see what could be the cause. Turns out he hasn't installed Google Chrome and is using Samsung Internet instead.
Now I did manage to get the App working with Samsung Internet so far, but with Samsung Internet the address-bar still appears.
There are a few tutorials to setup your TWA for Chrome OR Samsung Internet, but how can I combine these two? I guess we shouldn't force the user to download Chrome first. I haven't found any articles concerning this issue, so I'd be grateful if someone can link me some.
When using a Trusted Web Activity with the recommended android-browser-helper library, the application will check for an installed browser that supports Trusted Web Activity, giving preference to the user's preferred browser.
If there's no browser that supports the protocol available, it will fall back to using a Custom Tab and, if Custom Tabs is not available, open the browser.
The library also contains a WebView fallback for developers who prefer that to the Custom Tab / browser. A demo on how to use the WebView fallback is available here.
Regarding the Samsung Internet browsers, it added support for Trusted Web Activity in November 2020 (version 13.0.2.9). Currently, Chrome, Samsung Internet, Firefox, Edge and others support Trusted Web Activity, covering the vast majority of users. An updated list of browser support is maintained here.
After tons of wasted time trying to figure this out myself and lots of research I found this article:
https://medium.com/#firt/google-play-store-now-open-for-progressive-web-apps-ec6f3c6ff3cc
Where you can find this info:
TWAs work only with Chrome today, but the API might be also cloned by other browsers, such as Samsung Internet, Edge or Firefox in the future.
*UPDATE 2/4: The TWA works over the Android Custom Tab protocol that other browsers are currently implementing, so if the user doesn’t have Chrome or has changed the default browser, another browser might take precedence and open the TWA with the PWA content. More testing is needed to understand how it works.
What happens if the user has an older version of Chrome and installs the app from the Play Store? In this case, your PWA will appear as a Chrome Custom Tab, not in a completely standalone mode.
What that means in a nutshell: TWA's are actually useless, as long as you need your App to be compatible with a lot of different devices (like most do). I also noticed many Apps don't work if you disable Chrome on your Device, why I guess these are using TWA's too (and getting bad reviews on PlayStore instead).
So what I did was to dump away everything I did with TWA, and simply started using Cordova instead. It would have been great to have something like TWA's working just that simple, but as long as it's not working without having Chrome installed, there's no point in using it at all.
And not having this stated on https://developers.google.com directly, but fuzzy and unclear, has probably ended in the waste of time of many dev's and/or tons of Users being unable to use some Apps.
I just checked my TWA and it is working for particular browsers as follows:
Chrome without any problem
Edge on first launch shows message running in edge, later works as expected
Opera working as expected
Samsung browser - asks to open in browser, but works fine in browser. hides address bar if opened in browser
Firefox(once a best browser around ...) asks to open in browser, if opened it still shows address bar
I'm creating a website and I've been testing in different browsers, but not android devices, because I don't normally have access. Someone looked at the site on an Android phone (using the default web browser and chrome) and one of the pages is not displaying correctly. My index page is just a full screen image, but on the Android device, the image is pushed up and the bottom half of the screen is white. I can't figure out why this would be different on an Android phone. How can I test my site to see how it would react on an Android phone?
You can download android studio from google
Since it just needs java, it should work on OSX also. In the studio you would be able to lauch different emulated devices, fully connected to the network.
The download is huge and the setup is relatively easy. And it's flexible, when it comes to the different android versions, devices and screen sizes.
Download Android Studio and use the emulator
Or Genymotion is another emulator you could use. I have not used it myself, but it is probably the most popular emulator out side of the official one in android studio.
My purpose is to emulate samsung galaxy s3 and Samsung Galaxy Tablet and use their respective internet browsers to test how each device renders a webpage.To work the code more efficiently I'll need to have an inspector, similar to the one Apple offers in the Safari browser integrated with the iOS simulator).
Is there any plugin that enables the user to use a console and inspect the website from the AVD browser?
Just found this amazing tool: Google Chrome Canary. It was exactly what I needed. I can use the chrome console to inspect any element I want and also emulate a wide variety of devices. Here is how to .I strongly recommend it to any user!.
Do I need to install an emulator of some sort? Are there any online services that offer this? I've found little guidance elsewhere on this matter. I'm on Windows 8, just trying to figure out (locally) why my android users are experiencing issues with an MVC app.
The easiest way would be to download and install the Android SDK and use the emulator to try and reproduce the problem. The SDK has emulator images for all versions of Android, and you can create devices with different screens (resolution/dpi/size), so if your site uses responsive design you can test also how it scales across different devices and whether the problem affects one specific or all Android devices.
However, it is possible that the emulator might not be good enough for reproducing and understanding the problem. The Android SDK images come with the browser that is part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). While this browser is technically based on WebKit, it is based on a rather old version of it. Most OEMs that have built Android devices have signed the Google Mobile Services (GMS) license ship on their devices the Google suite of apps which includes the latest version of Chrome, which is based on the most recent WebKit version. The difference in the behavior between the two browsers is rather big.
So if the problem turns out to be with Chrome instead of the AOSP Browser, you will have to buy a real device and test on it. Depending on the budget you have and whether you want a phone or a tablet, you can go with a Nexus 5 ($350 w/o contract), Nexus 7 ($230 wifi only), or a Moto G ($175 w/o contract). Of course, you could also buy Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One X, or a Moto X, but they all will cost you more.
It might be worth also borrowing from someone a Samsung Galaxy Ace 2, or equivalent low end MDPI device.
well, you can install an android emulator and use the browser there (http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/index.html), but it's extremely slow,
so you should, instead, try Genymotion. It's an android virtual machine and it's pretty smooth. (http://www.genymotion.com/)
another option, is the Opera mobile emulator, but that is specifically for the mobile Opera browser. (http://www.opera.com/developer/mobile-emulator)
if you want a chrome specific approach, try this (https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/mobile-emulation)
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html has the emulators.
… but it may be just as cost-effective to just spring the $40 for a cheap Android tablet with WiFi.