ios 7 tel: links not working when web app opened from home screen

Question

I have a functional web app running on iOS 6, where I use the url scheme tel: at several places. Since I installed the beta 6 Version of iOS 7, these links don't seem to work anymore. But only when the web app is running in this kind of "sandbox" mode, when opened from the home screen. When it is opened in safari directly, the links work as expected.

I tried a normal http link to be sure that there is not a general problem related to links. But no, this works properly in both modes.

Does anyone have an idea or experienced the same? Is this some kind of "security feature"?

Thank you.

Answer 1

What a mess. Dozends of our apps are now affected. One thing i noticed is that when you click on a link which has for example a 'href="tel:..' a native popup appears showing the options call, add to contacts etc. Maybe we can somehow put a javascript which clicks the link virtually 2 seconds long to manipulate the long click by the user. It could be a workaround until this bug will hopefully be fixed sooner then later. Anybody with an idea or a script?

Answer 2

This is a bug, mailto: links also don't work. I submitted a bug to Apple on this and they have now (finally) closed my bug labelling it as a duplicate of a known issue. This at least means they definitely know about it and are working on it.

Now, why this even made it to a public release? That's a whole other question....

EDIT: Fixed as of iOS 7.0.4

Answer 3

Try disabling this meta tag:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"/>

Basically what's happening in this Apple iOS7 bug is the home icon app cannot leave context of its sandbox, thus it cannot dial the phone link/number (via 'tel:') nor switch to the Mail app to create a new email (via 'mailto:'.)

Answer 4

It appears that as of update 7.0.3 the web app links are now working! At least the tel: links that I am using in this particular application are now working.