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Onsen UI only supports Android 4.4.4+ and Android 4.0+ with Crosswalk engine.

Won’t work at all with Android 2.x or 3.x.

OK. Here’s for the benefit of everyone why things may not work with Onsen UI, when it is OK on development desktop web browser and some newer Android devices, but not older Android devices.

The problem you may be facing may be due to your WebView. I faced a similar issue and started a thread too. For my Android 4.4.2 (KitKat) phone, the bundled WebView is based on Chrome 30 dating back to September/October 2013 when Android 4.4.2 was released. In comparison, the latest stable Chrome is already 58 or 59.

If you’re testing it on an old phone with Android version earlier than 4.4.4 (KitKat), you may run into trouble. Onsen UI may not initialize properly due to some scripting errors for these WebViews that do not support some newer features. I am not sure what that feature is, but could be due to Web Components, polyfill and what’s not.

Samsung Galaxy J2 (2015) is a newer phone that comes with Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop). Its WebView and Chrome can also be updated to the latest version. For this newer phone, it should run flawlessly without any trouble.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (2013) is an older phone that ships with Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) with a possible later firmware upgrade to Android 4.4.2 (KitKat). However, even with the latest upgrade to 4.4.2, it is still below the Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) required by Onsen UI to work properly. It is not possible to update the Chrome and WebView for these older Android devices.

What you may observe is during development on your desktop web browser (recent Chrome versions) using monaca preview, your app looks normal. You monaca debug on a newer Android device like Android 5.0, 6.0 or 7.0 it will look OK too.

However, the moment you monaca debug on an older 4.1-4.3 Jelly Bean or 4.4.2 KitKat device which still exists aplenty in the developing world like India, China and South America, what you may see for your app will be a white page with black text. All the formatting, styling, coloring and alignment will be off. So a beautifully styled app becomes an unformatted web page with jumbled text all over.

Finally, the conclusion is that Onsen UI does not support any older device below Android 4.4.4 and has no intention to do so in future. Your solution would be to bundle in a newer WebView from Crosswalk (also deprecated by Intel already), which would bloat your app into 20 MB package, not even counting in other Cordova plugins you may use which adds another few megabytes. To use the Crosswalk WebView:

cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview

Your Cordova project will in future output 2 apks: android-armv7-debug.apk and android-x86-debug.apk for different platform.