Blocked JS deviceorientation devicemotion on Android WebView

Question

I've written a JS SDK for Android WebView that collects device orientation and motion. The SDK listens to deviceorientation and devicemotion events on the window like so:

window.addEventListener('devicemotion', (event) => {...})
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', (event) => {...})

On some devices/integrations, I get no sensors data. I've tried to mimic a "bad" integration, attempting to block the WebView sensors access by adding the following to the app manifest but with no luck. The JS events are still triggered:

<activity
    android:screenOrientation="portrait"
    android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation|screenSize"

What are other possible ways to block the WebView from triggering the events, besides disabling JS all together?

Update: Some insights:
the most problematic devices are:

Samsung Galaxy Tab a 10.1 SM-T580
Samsung Galaxy J5 Prime SM-G570M

Update 2
I have similar issues on IOS on some devices, most problematic is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148

[Blocking device rotation on mobile web pages](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3501510/blocking-device-rotation-on-mobile-web-pages) — RonTLV, Aug 01 '19 at 08:08

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 24 '19 at 08:16

0

Might be, it's not possible to stop only triggering JS events through android, if you want it then it'll disable whole JS.

//disabled
  wView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(false);
//enabled
  wView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);

As, you told that on some devices you aren't getting sensors data, for this you need to check your webview decleration code. Sample code is here:

  wView= new WebView(this);
  wView.getSettings().setLoadsImagesAutomatically(true);
  wView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
  wView.setScrollBarStyle(View.SCROLLBARS_INSIDE_OVERLAY);

  wView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
        @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
        @Override
        public void onReceivedError(WebView view, int errorCode, String description, String failingUrl) {
            Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, description, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
        }

        @TargetApi(android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.M)
        @Override
        public void onReceivedError(WebView view, WebResourceRequest req, WebResourceError rerr) {
            // Redirect to deprecated method, so you can use it in all SDK versions
            onReceivedError(view, rerr.getErrorCode(), rerr.getDescription().toString(), req.getUrl().toString());
        }
    });

  wView.loadUrl(HOST_URL);

In Manifest

<activity
  android:name=".MainActivity"
  android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize" />

answered Jul 24 '19 at 08:16

Ali Azaz Alam

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Thank you for your reply, I have no control over the webview declaration. js is not disabled since I'm getting other params from my SDK. Just sensor data is disabled for some reason. My goal is to understand why and to try to mimic the behavior locally. – Shlomi Schwartz Jul 24 '19 at 08:26
can i get that web url? – Ali Azaz Alam Jul 24 '19 at 08:42
Just create a simple HTML page with `window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', (event) => {...})` and see if you can disable it from being triggered using native code. thanks :) – Shlomi Schwartz Jul 24 '19 at 08:51
what's your working platform? Android(native) or Ionic – Ali Azaz Alam Jul 24 '19 at 09:47
and what you want like you want to catch trigger JS functions in android? – Ali Azaz Alam Jul 24 '19 at 10:00
and what you're using 'deviceorientation' or 'orientationchange' – Ali Azaz Alam Jul 24 '19 at 10:07
Android native with a webView, the JS already catch other events like touchStart. it fails to detect `deviceorientation` and `devicemotion` events – Shlomi Schwartz Jul 24 '19 at 10:16

Blocked JS deviceorientation devicemotion on Android WebView

1 Answers1