Is this the biggest limitation of Bubble?

mitchell2 · September 19, 2021, 10:11pm

I have been searching everywhere to try and find anyone who has had similar issues to this but come up with nothing…

I’m assuming there are a very significant number of Bubblers who advertise their apps through Facebook and don’t even realise this is a massive issue.

Basically, dynamic data and other elements do not render correctly on the in-app browser for Facebook. Essentially, for anyone who clicks on our ad in Facebook on an iphone can’t see our app correctly.

I have only just realised this issue and assume we have lost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands in revenue due to this problem since we’ve launched.

Every page in our app displays correctly in any browser except for Facebooks in-app browser. I have tried changing fonts to web-safe fonts but this doesn’t solve the issue.

Has anyone experienced similar? I presume this bug has been reported before but does Bubble actually have a working solution to this or are we just doomed if our sales channel is Facebook ads?

Attached screenshots.

mitchell2 · August 28, 2021, 12:24am

Literally no Bubble apps I have been on can display dynamic data in Facebook in-app browser?! How are not more people talking about this?

Jacob_D · September 15, 2021, 4:36pm

Http links don’t work either. @emmanuel

jaredg · September 18, 2021, 10:40pm

Any workarounds discovered? Finding out this similar huge issue for my bubble apps today.

adamhholmes · September 19, 2021, 9:47am

Yes, this is worrying…

We had apps working fine on Facebook’s in-app browser previously, but now having just checked it seems none are, at least in Apple IOS 14 (even Bubble’s own website is not displaying dynamic data).

I remember there were some issues a while ago with Instagram’s in-app browser not loading Bubble apps correctly, but Facebook always seemed to work fine. Alas, not anymore.

It seems to be loading certain data from the database, and not other things - certain fields are displaying (specifically images) whilst others are not.

Very frustrating for anyone who relies on FB advertising or organic FB traffic for their app (as we do).

Hopefully this issue can be resolved soon (but seeing as this post is already 22 days old, I’m not so sure!).

gbenchanoch · September 19, 2021, 10:50am

Has everyone on this thread submitted a bug report?

Edit: I have submitted a bug report. Please do the same as the “help needed” tag on the forum will not get attention from the technical team.

nfisher · September 19, 2021, 10:21am

This is concerning, as needless to say, a lot of apps will rely on social media referrals.

jaredg · September 19, 2021, 3:14pm

I submitted a bug report. For me I confirmed the issue started with the release of iOS 14.8 last week. Before that my sites were displaying fine.

gbenchanoch · September 19, 2021, 4:47pm

@jess Is the team aware of this issue?

adamhholmes · September 19, 2021, 6:19pm

It seems to be specifically an issue with dynamic data being displayed as a text, button, or a link.

Dynamic images work fine, and I can display text data in, for example, an input’s initial content, but it won’t display in text elements, buttons, or in links.

So it’s not an issue i accessing the data, but rather displaying it in certain types of elements.

johnny · September 20, 2021, 3:16am

I would say let’s file bug reports at bubble.io/bug_report. The more we file the more attention we’ll probably catch from the Bubble team is my guess…

ri_scc_94 · September 20, 2021, 2:22pm

I don’t know if it’s possible (I’m a total noob in programming),

but instead of uploading your bubble link in facebook, add a firebase dynamic link that will trigger to open your bubble url in a native browser?

Just brainstorming here haha

dojin23 · September 21, 2021, 4:07pm

Hey Jared,

I had no choice but to come up with the workaround.

Currently, my primary goal is to get them off the FB browser. So to achieve that, I have my user go through survey questions and sign up (using all static and Arial or Inter fonts). After they signup, they will receive a SMS notification with the verification code and then the link to my website. When they click on the link from SMS, they will open up the site with the default browser on their phone. They put in their verification code, and now they are in the perfectly working browser.

This is the best workaround I could come up with. If anybody else has a recommendation, please let me know!

jaredg · September 21, 2021, 5:38pm

That’s a good workaround. It won’t work for my use case, unfortunately.

Bubble has confirmed this is a bug so I hope their engineers will resolve it quickly.

In the meantime, I am detecting the user agent of the Facebook InApp browser and if the OS is ios 14.8 or 15. When that is true, I display a floating group overlay over the whole site with the message:

gbenchanoch · September 21, 2021, 5:52pm

Brilliant. Could you post the code snippet for identifying facebook’s user agent?

jaredg · September 21, 2021, 6:32pm

You can use this in Javascript: navigator.userAgent

Or one of the browser plugins like this to get the UserAgent: Browser Plugin | Bubble

Then setup workflows that look for text in the user agent string like this (I have one for 14.8 and one for ios 15):

You can also use something like the user agent parse api here: https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/api/

For faster speed without any API calls, it’s best to use the client’s userAgent though since we’re looking for one specific thing for the time being.

Here’s what my phone shows for the FB inApp browser user agent when on iOS 14.8:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_8 like Mac OS X) WebKit/8611 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/18H17 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBDV/iPhone12,3;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/14.8;FBSS/3;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5]

(To get the user agent, post this link to you facebook page and then open it up in Facebook and it will use the in-app browser and you can get the user agent for your device: https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/useragents/parse/?analyse-my-user-agent=yes#parse-useragent )