Snapshot message doesn't work on webar

Issue: If you take a screenshot using Zapworks’ snapshot method with a message on webar, the message will not be displayed, ever, on any social network.

Affecting: Zapworks Studio

Workaround: None.

This issue was already reported long ago, and never fixed.

Hi Mark,

To provide a bit of history, the Zappar platform in Studio was built and designed before WebAR was possible, targeting native iOS and Android runtimes. Our WebAR runtime thus makes a best effort basis to support the same APIs, so that it can support as well as possible all existing content, even though the underlying platform is really very different.

Some platform features such as mp4 playback from videos in the media library involved a significant amount of work and effort, and so in WebAR that “just works” and users don’t notice the difference.

There are some features that do have stronger requirements on the underlying platform API, and sharing media that’s just on the client is one of those (we don’t want to upload snapshots to a server for GDPR and privacy reasons). With iOS 15 supporting the WebShare level 2 API it is now at least possible to share images directly to social media apps from the browser. It seems in iOS 15 only the image is shared, even if the other potential title / text attributes are filled in, so I’m not sure there are any changes we can make that would improve things here - it’s down to the implementations of the browsers (and potentially the social media apps too).

We know it’s an important use-case and it’s something we do continuously review to try to provide the best experience possible on all browsers and operating system versions (there are multiple share screens used depending on the iOS version for example).

Simon

2 Likes

@simon Hi Simon, thanks for the feedback.

It seems in iOS 15 only the image is shared, even if the other potential title / text attributes are filled in, so I’m not sure there are any changes we can make that would improve things here - it’s down to the implementations of the browsers (and potentially the social media apps too).

This is true. However, it doesn’t work on Android either. When I use navigator.share to share image and text with chrome on android, I can see the text. So while there is indeed an issue with iOS15, there is also an issue with Zappar’s implementation of this feature.

Ah righto, good to know. We like to keep things as consistent as possible cross-platform (and between native and web runtimes) but this case is maybe one where we should expose a few more options and document that not all browsers / runtime platforms will fully support all combinations of all options.

1 Like

we should expose a few more options and document that not all browsers / runtime platforms will fully support all combinations of all options.

@simon This sounds great, I already made a feature request about this.

@simon Upon further testing, sharing with text does work on iOS15, but it depends on the social network. It doesn’t work on whatsapp, but it works on twitter for example. But with Zappar, like I said, it doesn’t work on any social media, be it android or iOS.

@simon You can check the index.html file in the zip below to test the web share functionality with an image(you probably need a local https server). It takes a screenshot and attempts to share, using arjs + html2canvas. Follow the video on how to use the sample, but it’s very simple, you just need to wait to load, tap on the screen, wait for ok message, and tap on the screen again.

index.zip (47.7 KB)

Attached you will also find the zapworks version to take a screenshot and share, you just need to tap once on the screen.

shareTRexTest.zpp (5.1 MB)

And also attached is the tracking image(works for zapworks version and arjs)

trex-image-big

The text is only shared with the arjs version. I hope this helps.