autoplay videos does not work on cordova-IOS with Meteor 1.3

[macrozone]

On Meteor 1.2 it was possible to play videos on cordova-ios without user interaction:

<video src="/path/to/video.mp4 autoplay>`

With Meteor 1.3. autoplay no longer works.

There is a Cordova-Preference for this but this seems to have no effect:

App.setPreference("MediaPlaybackRequiresUserAction", false);

I created a simple repo to reproduce: https://github.com/macrozone/meteor-cordova-ios-video-autoplay.git

Can someone confirm?

Edit:

After a little bit debugging on xcode I found out that the setting "MediaPlaybackRequiresUserAction" is not passed to the WkWebview.

It seems that no property from cordova's config.xml is passed to WkWebview, there seems to be an open PR: apache/cordova-plugin-wkwebview-engine#7

Fortunalty I found a workaround: disabling the WKWebview:

App.setPreference("CordovaWebViewEngine", "CDVUIWebViewEngine");

[laosb]

looks like a Cordova bug. Is there anything meteor can do for this?

[macrozone]

It's somewhat meteor related, because meteor choses wkwebview as default, whereas cordova has UIWebview as default.

This might be mentioned in the docs as a gotcha of wkwebview. It took me a really long time to figure out what's the problem and I think others might have the same problem.

Also the option to chose between wkwebview and uiwebview should be mentioned.

[laosb]

So there comes two issues in fact:

• Mention the use of WKWebview in docs. (It has been mentioned in History.md, if you noticed that.)
• Mention how to switch to UIWebview. (Personally I disagree, as UIWebview should be deprecated.)

[laosb]

Sounds like two docs issues now. @macrozone I would suggest your posting this to meteor/docs. Closing this on meteor/meteor.

[macrozone]

ok thx, @laosb , will do that.

(I would also love to see UIWebview deprecated, but the cordova-integration of WkWebview seems to be not ready yet as I think that not been able to autoplay videos is a major regression)

[macrozone]

It seems that hotcode-reload does not work on cordova with UIWebview.

The webview does reload, when I do a change, but the change is not visible. I need to restart the app in order to see the change.

Can someone confirm this?

--> i'll open a new issue for this

[trymbill]

Thanks for the quick fix @macrozone, been looking for a solution to the autoplay issue for a few hours now and you just saved my night 👍