Video not working anymore on Android, works on iOS (https issue?)

General Discussion
#1

Hi there,

We’re in the middle of a campaign right now and we’re suddenly having issues with delivering video-content to Android phones. iOS seems to work fine.

In short:

  • Cleared the cache of both Android and iOS devices as a start; that didn’t change anything (including trying a first-time install of the Zappar-app on both Android and iOS; same issue)
  • The Zappar-project gets loaded on an Android phone (UI, overlays etc… are working)
  • Video shows loading-icon and after 3-4 seconds the loading-icon is gone. Nothing happens. The video is black. No audio, no video.

I’ve tried the following

  • It probably has something to do with the server the video URL is set to. We’ve made the domain the video is on secure (http --> https) last month. The original project video URL is still referring to http://www… But when setting the URL in ZapWorks Studio to https://www… and previewing the project nothing changes; the video is still black.
  • When uploading the video to a different (private) webserver without https-connection though, the video is working in preview mode on Android and iOS. Sadly hosting the video-content on a different server isn’t the solution.

Does anybody have an idea what this can be? It has something to do with Android vs. iOS and probably with the https-connection we’ve added to the server. It still is strange that it only seems to affect Android and not iOS.

Thanks in advance.

Ferdy

#2

Hi Ferdy,

Sorry to hear that. Would you be able to share the URL with us? We’ll take a look to see if we can recreate the issue here and work out what’s going on. Feel free to send it through to support@zappar.com if you’d rather not share it on the public forum here.

Good work with your investigations so far. We definitely recommend HTTPS - the latest version of Android (Pie) makes it mandatory in any case.

Cheers,
Connell

#3

@connell, thanks for your quick reply. I’ve send the information to the support e-mail address since we don’t want the URL to be public.

Hope to hear from you soon!

#4

Having taken a look into this, the web server had a lovely new SSL certificate but was missing the intermediate certificate from the configuration. There’s a super helpful tool from DigiCert for diagnosing issues like this here:
https://www.digicert.com/help/
Popping those in solved the issue :slight_smile:

#5

Great quick reply @connell, thanks again. I indeed only installed the Root certificate on our webserver, but had to install the intermediate certificate too to fix this problem.

The tool which Connell refers to, failed on one of the items it checks for. After installing the right certificates the tool ran again (being successfully this time) and the Zap now works as expected.

BTW: We had to republish the Zap forcing “https://www…” as Video URL as automatically rewriting http:// to https:// didn’t work in the Zap. Not giving the URL a protocol (video URL starting with “www…”) doesn’t work either.