model-viewer not working inside the WKWebView on iOS

[Mikilll94]

Description

Is model-viewer working inside the WKWebView? It works fine in Safari browser or inside SFSafariViewController, but I cannot make it work inside WKWebView?

Browser Affected

• Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox
• Helios
• IE
• Safari
• WKWebView

OS

• Android
• iOS
• Linux
• MacOS
• Windows

[cdata]

@Mikilll94 thanks for reporting. Unfortunately, we do not have testing visibility into WKWebView at this time.

In general, I am comfortable stating that <model-viewer> is broadly compatible with modern, standards-abiding web browsers. Webviews on Android and iOS are not true web browsers:

• They don't get timely updates the same way that modern browsers do
• They usually cannot be debugged using remote debugging without writing a lot of glue code
• They can only be tested in CI if we create/maintain a native app ourselves

For the above reasons, we cannot offer explicit support for <model-viewer> in Android/iOS webviews. However, I will try to help to the extent that I can.

For troubleshooting purposes:

• Would you be able to confirm the version information of the WKWebView you are using? (if you can get the value of navigator.userAgent, that would tell us what we need to know)
• Can you confirm that you are including ALL of the recommended polyfills in the page before <model-viewer> is loaded?

[Mikilll94]

@cdata

Here is the user agent of the WKWebView which I am using:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148

[cdata]

@Mikilll94 thanks. Do you have any kind of logging set up for your app? Can you share any JavaScript exceptions that may be related?

[uprealdigital]

Hi! Any news on that?

The company 8th wall states that WebAR now works with your favorite apps like Instagram which uses WKWebView with the new iOS 14.3+.
https://www.8thwall.com/blog/post/41168830873/8th-wall-now-works-across-all-major-ios-apps-including-instagram-snapchat-and-more

How is it possible that it works for 8th wall but not with the model viewer?

[elalish]

model-viewer uses WebXR (which doesn't exist on iOS yet) or Quick Look, which is a separate app. 8th wall works in the browser because they do AR in JS without ARKit at all, which is why it is slower and has a different feature set.

[uprealdigital]

@elalish Thank you so much for the valuable information and for answering my question so quickly!