I’m in the process of developing an FB app, which needs to be able to run in the usual desktop FB site (with surrounding FB livery), on mobile device browsers (I’m using HTML5 and Bootstrap to adapt the layout according to device), and within native mobile Facebook apps on iOS and Android.
In particular this last scenario – I’m trying to develop on my MBP and I’m using a local domain name (set in hosts) that points to my web server box next to me. In order to make that work from the iOS device, I have Charles running as a proxy on my MBP and have updated the iPhone wifi proxy settings so that all iPhone http requests are channeled through Charles, and therefore the iPhone can also use the localised domain name.
When testing through the mobile FB website, if i navigate to the test app I’ve created the FB mobile website launches the canvas in a new safari tab, and it works fine.
However, within the iOS native FB app, when I navigate to the app I receive a
“Sorry, something went wrong”
message in place of where the canvas content should be (see image linked below).
Since FB forces https canvas URLs now I’m using the built-in self-certified certificate of my web server so that https can be served up. In the safari browser I initially get an untrusted certificate warning, which I accept and then I have no problems using my html.
Has anyone else seen this problem and know how to get around it? I’m assuming the FB app is having problems with the untrusted certs, but since the native app is calling a locally served (via proxy) URL, I dont see why there should be a problem (could the FB app be set to not accept untrusted certs?).
I really need to test my code within the iOS app otherwise I wont be able to prove to the client that FB works with my code.
Cheers
Lee
(p.s. I tried using 3G instead of the local wifi proxy in case something there was causing the problem, but it still didnt work in the native iOS FB app)
Turns out the problem was due to the mobile URL I had specified in the app settings was set to use https. Presumably this is because the native app won’t accept untrusted SSL certificates (which is also probably why it was fine in the browser, because one can accept untrusted certificates).
Changing the protocol to http fixed the issue. Strangely Facebook doesn’t insist on the use of https for mobile app URLs, so using http was not a problem.