Enabling iOS web content restrictions breaks Meteor Cordova apps

[graemian]

Hi all,

My Meteor Cordova app (‎Allowance Tracker - Bomad on the App Store) won’t load because of iOS Screen Time web content restrictions. My users see the following screen after launching the app:

Tapping “Allow Website” does nothing.

This happens when web content is restricted to approved sites only:

If I add “localhost” as an approved site, it works:

I’ve tested on iPadOS 17.5.1 and iOS 17.6.1

So I think this means that no Meteor Cordova apps will work when web content is restricted like this on iOS?

I’ve searched but I haven’t been able to find much about this problem. I did find confirmation here though:

https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/732008

But nothing in the Cordova forums (GitHub - apache/cordova-ios: Apache Cordova iOS)

I tested another app (‎Chores & Allowance Bot on the App Store) which I think is a wrapper on a website and it worked without being “allowed” as above. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Any suggestions and advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

P.S. Where else might I asked about this? I’m going to try Issues · apache/cordova-ios · GitHub

[graemian]

Here’s the Cordova iOS issue I just posted:

App not loading due to iOS Screen Time web content restrictions

[rjdavid]

Have you tried this:

Ionic App blocked by iOS 'Specific Website Only' restriction

[graemian]

Thanks, but what specifically are you suggesting I try?

I think this sounds promising, but it would require changes to Meteor Cordova:

For those who are still stumbling upon this, newer versions of cordova-plugin-ionic-webview now support using the app scheme instead of serving over http://localhost. Using the app scheme will allow the app to not get blocked by iOS’ Content Restriction. Hope this helps!

Specifically,

meteor/npm-packages/cordova-plugin-meteor-webapp at devel · meteor/meteor

would need to be changed to use “the app scheme” instead of http://localhost

[rjdavid]

It has been years since we moved to PWA so my cordova knowledge might be obsolete. But there should be an accessRule method for the config to set <allow-navigation>

[graemian]

Thanks, but I checked in my config.xml and Meteor already includes a rule to allow localhost access:

<allow-navigation href="http://localhost" />

This problem arises because recent versions of iOS block localhost when Screen Time is used to restrict web content. This overrides all the allow rules in the app.

[graemian]

I’ve also filed a bug report on Github:

New iOS web content restrictions block cordova-plugin-meteor-webapp's access to localhost, app won't run

[graemian]

I just realized that pressing “Allow Website” on the error page:

adds “localhost” to the list of approved sites.

However, it doesn’t trigger a reload, so the error remains on the screen. It also doesn’t give any other kind of feedback, so it seems like nothing happened.

If you close the app and re-open it, it works. However, it’s not obvious that you need to do this.