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I am in the midst of developing a card game as a web application using Node.js and Socket.io. As an Android user with a Nexus 5 and the latest OS, along with the newest version of Chrome mobile, I haven't experienced any issues. After using an iPhone 5 and ironing out some minor issues, I've noticed that when the screen is turned off on the phone, the socket disconnects. I have server side logging (I'm running through cloud 9 services), that says the id of the player when they disconnect (which just happens to be the socket identifier as well). Turning off the screen on Android doesn't seem to have any issues, and it only disconnects when I quit the application completely by swiping it away from the open applications/multitasking view. Having a web application that creates a new player for each websocket connection to individual games becomes pretty useless if that player is removed from the game each time their screen turns off.

Any ideas as to what may be causing this or any configuration changes I could make that would prevent this? I've tried Googling but can't seem to find any related issues.

EDIT - Using javascript socket.io

Unilat
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  • Which socket.io client are you using? iOS or Javascript? – verybadalloc Dec 15 '13 at 20:09
  • I am using Javascript – Unilat Dec 15 '13 at 20:12
  • This might provide you some insight: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17987182/socket-io-xhr-polling-disconnect-event – brandonscript Dec 15 '13 at 20:45
  • @r3mus Unfortunately that doesn't really help, and is the opposite of my issue. In that case the iPhone isn't sending a record of it's disconnection. In my case, it is, when I don't want it to. The screen turning off or switching app sends a disconnect message to the server despite the web page still being maintained in the application. – Unilat Dec 15 '13 at 20:52
  • I think the part that sunk in was that iOS doesn't fully support websockets; I suspect that iOS is designed to terminate all safari connections on screen lock. Can't be certain of course, so good luck! – brandonscript Dec 15 '13 at 21:09
  • I was actually using Chrome on iOS which in theory should work the same across devices. I can't imagine this is the only case of this happening as web sockets are pretty much the way to go when it comes to web application games. – Unilat Dec 15 '13 at 22:02

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I have done some extensive tests with ios 6, ios 7 and ios 8 alongside eachother. with socket.io

I can confirm that sleep / power off on ios 7 will immediately disconnect the socket. This is not the case on ios 6 nor ios 8.

this is good to know, although one should of course handle both scenarios.

on ios 6 or 8 your connection remains if you turn on the device again within the heart beat timeout. If you wait longer the connection will disconnect anyways.

David Rinnan
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