iOS 8 - Videos and sound files won't play from home screen web app

Question

I have an HTML5 web app which uses JWPlayer for embedded videos and podcasts. This works fine in iOS 7, both within Safari and when saved as a web app to the home screen.

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Answer 1

On iOS 8 I have noticed that sometimes media will not play audio in the foreground app. The problem appears to be another app has not released the system audio and hence the foreground app is not able to play audio.

To work around this I:

• Force close other media apps (double tap then swipe up to close).
• Close Safari tabs that are open to media items (Vimeo, YouTube, web page based media players).

Then I retry the app with the media I want to play and it will usually work.

Answer 2

iOS 8.3 fixes the bug. Videos are now playable from homescreen webapp, including from appcache.