Smart app banners do not appear after being closed on iPad with IOS7

Question

In short, my team has a mobile site and an app in the appstore. We have added the meta tag to show the smart app banner. I saw it and everything worked as expected. Probl

Answer 1

Also had this problem on both iOS8 and iOS9.

Using the info on this page (thanks!), I found the following solution:

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Tested with iTunes 12.3.1.23 on OSX 10.9.5 with iPhone 5S running iOS 8.4.1

1. Find the app-id by searching the website's source by searching for "app-id" Example for www.marktplaats.nl:
2. Make a "local computer backup" with iTunes
3. Find your backup (probably in: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/)
4. Make a copy of your backup just in case (Yes: a backup of a backup :-)
5. Search backup for the app-id. I used: grep "373963365" -r * in the Backup folder
6. For my example grep found a "hide banner file" starting with 03f01e41fc5d containing the app-id:

bplist00—Y373963365

7. Change the app-id number to an app-id number from which you never want to see a smart app banner or just increment the app-id by one and save the file.
8. Restore the changed backup to your device.

Notes:

• Making, copying, searching and restoring a backup takes some time if you have a 16GB backup like me; be patient.
• You might find multiple app-ids in the "hide banner file". I don't see why this procedure wouldn't work for changing multiple app-ids
• Don't delete the "hide banner file" as this will corrupt your backup.
• Incrementing the app-id by one or choosing any other 9 figure random number will hide that "random" smart app banner!
• I also successfully did this on a new iPad running iOS 9.0.2

For those who want to go the jailbreak way: I found the file on a jailbroken iPad here: /var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/{Safari App ID}/Library/Webkit/StoreBannerTracker.plist

@Apple: why can't we just delete this using Clear History and Website Data ????