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 want to have a mini chrome browser inside my app like Twitter or Telegram does, that 'Powered by Chrome' thing, not a WebView in an Activity.
Also, if some certain users have no Chrome or Google installed, can they use this mini broswer?
I have an application configured to support FB authentication, but it seems to be window.fbAsyncInit() didn't gets called from some of my mobile devices whereas it works for desktop and some mobile devices.
Works for : Android(Marshmallow OS) with Default browser
Desktop with Chrome and Firefox
Not works for: IOS with Safari browser
Android(Lollipop) with chrome browser
Does anyone know the reason?
Thanks in advance
My problem is that in my mobile nexus5 with chrome browser, I can launch a native application with a schema or go to another page if failed, everything works well. But in some other mobiles still with chrome browser (in my case, there are mobiles made by manufactories from China like Huawei, they custom their android system like the way HTC and Sumsung do), the browser seems like treating the schema as a http request and open it, and then shows this page cannot be displayed. And also my Javasript code in previous page cannot work anymore.
Is this a bug with chrome or because the android system is modified manufactory so that chrome cannot handle the schema correctly.