Onsen UI 2 on Android 4.x without Crosswalk: possible?

[wetfeet]

I wonder if using Onsen UI on Android 4.x is possible without Crosswalk, by stripping out less important features like web components, Polymer, polyfill etc. that older WebView chokes on.

The Crosswalk runtime is about 20 MB huge, and there is still quite a number of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean (9.1%) and 4.4.2 KitKat (18.8%) users around, according to the Android Developers Dashboard.

[misterjunio]

@wetfeet version 4.4.4, the latest still supported by Google, is still supported by Onsen UI as well. For earlier versions we intend to create a guide on how to polyfill certain features but it may take some time.

On another note, thank you for your active interest in Onsen UI and Monaca :smile:

[wetfeet]

@misterjunio Thank you for your reply.

I have verified that if I don’t use Crosswalk on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), the native WebView cannot load and initialize Onsen properly.

I understand that Google has decided to support 4.4.4, which is how Onsen has similarly chosen to follow. Just that in reality, people are not replacing their phones fast enough if they do not break, and it would be a shame to forgo this user base, which can go up to almost 20%. Recent Cordova for Android has set its lowest version to Android API level 16, which corresponds to Android 4.1 (Jellybean).

Onsen is generally great except for this potentially backward compatibility issue. I will have to make a choice between old phone users and making my apps large downloads.

[Fran Diox]

@wetfeet Recently we removed polyfills for old platforms that we don’t officially support. You will need to add few polyfills manually such as promises to make it work. Also, since we don’t test it on old devices, there could be some issues in specific components but hopefully nothing very serious.

[wetfeet]

@Fran-Diox I accept that Onsen UI officially supports only Android 4.4.4 and above. Anything below that is a hit-or-miss, and is not guaranteed to work since they are not tested.

[Gaurav]

Hey what about android version less than 4.x U can’t do anything About that ?? When I run my apk on older android version it shows there is a problem parsing package Can You solve this problem

[Fran Diox]

@wetfeet Exactly! However, PRs or issue reports are still welcome for <4.4.4 as long as they are not big changes unnecessary for >=4.4.4.

[Fran Diox]

@Gaurav Your best bet for very old devices is, as the OP said, Crosswalk :/

[Gaurav]

@Fran-Diox thanks for reply:smiley: