Crosswalk for iOS

[Jeff_P_]

I was wondering about using XDK.  Need it for Android & iOS.  Crosswalk seems like a no brainer for Android.  I have been all through many docs everywhere.  I came across that Crosswalk has a port for iOS.  Is this a viable option here?

​I plan on making a webGL application using BabylonJS framework (btw will supply a template if asked).  It has a couple of "cameras" for navigating in the scene, DeviceOrientationCamera & VRDeviceOrientationCamera.  They use the WC3 Device Orientation API.  In addition to getting the cordova plug-in to work for iOS, am concerned this will make building separately much more complicated.

​Crosswalk for iOS would seem to solve much complication with XDK.  FYI, framework also uses WebAudio,and I plan to use that as well.

[PaulF_IntelCorp]

There was a project for Crosswalk for iOS, but I do not believe it is well supported, especially since the update to iOS 10 (note the docs and commits reference iOS 8+ but that was before iOS 10, which has broken a lot of stuff). The only thing Crosswalk for iOS would provide you is an implementation for some of those additional web APIs that Crosswalk adds; other than that, it uses the Safari WkWebView that is built into an iOS device, because Apple does not allow for other webviews to be installed onto their devices, so it provides no performance advantage like it does for Android 4.x devices.

It appears that the device orientation API is availabe in iOS 9 and 10, with some known issues. See http://caniuse.com/#feat=deviceorientation for some info. Note that caniuse.com compatiblity tests are normally for the mobile browser on the device, not for the webview, however, the two are fairly close for recent versions of iOS, so the API should be there and working (allowing for the known issues). The only way to know for sure is to give it a try.

[Jeff_P_]

Thanks, Paul.  Was going to resort to just trying it, but glad to hear that you would not be surprised if it just works.  I have made a test scene.

​Am building a page first, so things can just be tested from browsers as a first step.  In it you are in a room with red, yellow, green, & orange walls, and white floor, blue ceiling.  Works fine from iOS tablet.  Oddly, did not work from a Android tablet running Chrome.  Need to investigate that before packaging to an app.

​Will add update this as I get time to come to any conclusions.

[Jeff_P_]

Github.io takes a while to build your pages.  I tried Android first, too soon apparently. It works on Android upon refresh.