Cordova - window.history.back() not working on HTML back button in iOS 9

Question

In my application I am using window.history.back to navigate back to previous View

Declaration of back button

 <         


        

Answer 1

The problem is that setting of window.location.hash is asynchronous in the iOS 9.0 UIWebview (used by Cordova/Phonegap) - see this bug report for details.

This causes issues when using jQuery Mobile which by default uses window.location.hash to navigate between "pages". It also causes issues with popups/dialogs/select menus which use this mechanism.

You can fix this by preventing jQuery Mobile from automatically listening/using location.hash:

$(document).on("deviceready", function(){
    $.mobile.hashListeningEnabled = false;
});

However, I found this had side effects on Android such as causing the hardware back button not to work, so I targeted it specifically at iOS 9 using cordova-plugin-device:

$(document).on("deviceready", function(){
    if(device.platform === "iOS" && parseInt(device.version) === 9){
        $.mobile.hashListeningEnabled = false;
    }
});

Note that I'm using navigator.app.backHistory() not window.history.back() in conjunction with hashListeningEnabled = false - this may make a difference.

Alternatively you can use this plugin to use the new WKWebView on iOS 8 and 9. WKWebView is used by Safari on iOS 8+, hence JQM sites viewed in the browser on iOS 9 don't encounter these issues. cordova-ios 3 still uses UIWebView due to a bug in WKWebView in iOS 8, but the upcoming cordova-ios 4 will support a WKWebView core plugin for iOS 9+. Note that there are additional considerations when using WKWebView with Cordova/Phonegap apps due to its stricter security, such as requiring CORS headers on XHR responses.