HTML5 Geolocation for iOS and Android

Question

I have an HTML5/jquery-mobile application for cross-platform support. I have Android with WebView and iOS with UIWebView that points to my site. I require geolocation services and while you can pass the device permission from Android to web-app using WebView ChromeClient.

webView.setWebChromeClient(new WebChromeClient(){
    @Override
    public void onGeolocationPermissionsShowPrompt(String origin, GeolocationPermissions.Callback callback){
        callback.invoke(origin, true, false);
    }
});

There is no such thing in iOS. Every time I use the application I get two permission request dialogs from the iOS app and the web-app. I don't use phonegap/cordova and have no need for them. This problem has stumped me for weeks and everyone else who has this problem uses phonegap/cordova.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position){
    // geolocation logic
}

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can't avoid that alert in UIWebView AFAIK. You could use iOS location API to get current location and pass it to the webpage. Many ways to do this:

• UIWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString("window.iosLocation = 43.3,-79.9"), on the page can check the UA to see if this it should expect this to be set, or it could wait for 1-2 seconds after load complete and if this prop is not set, then use HTML5 geo. You would inject this on UIWebViewDelegate.webViewDidFinishLoad
• have your page try call back to iOS native code, although this far more complicated than above (requires js injection/overrides on page load)
• Set a cookie for your domain on app start that contains the location, then try read the cookie on the page, see here on how to set a cookie: How to manage cookies with UIWebView in Swift