Mitigate Facebook Incompatibility with Glide

I just learned the hard way that glide doesn’t play well with facebook because their browser doesn’t support Progressive Web Apps. If a user clicks a link to my app on FB, they will not be able to sign in.

My target audience lives on Facebook so as long as install & share links don’t work, I am screwed.

(The workaround would be to select Open in Chrome/Safari from the FB web browser but of course my users don’t know this.)

Right now, FB users will get “Email address does not have access to the app” or the sign-in page will simply re-load depending on their sign-in method.

For share links and sign-ins, can the folks at glide consider looking at the user agent and provide an OS specific instruction page?

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Users should still be able to sign into the app if opened within Facebook. Maybe the ‘email address does not have access’ issue is unrelated.

Yes, we could try to detect if we are running within an app like Facebook or Instagram and encourage users to open in their browser.

I raised the issue with support and @George_B said:

Facebook uses its own browser shell. He has to paste the link into the default device browser, Safari or Chrome for the app to function correctly.

Here are some posts on the subject. Facebook has a “mini” browser built in that does not support all browser functions, specifically PWA apps, which Glide is. As you can see there are ways to set facebook to open the system browser instead of the built in one.

Force open in Safari / Chrome from limited Facebook Browser - #2 by Jeff_Hager

How to prompt user to install the app in Facebook browser?

I had an iOS user that experienced the issue that I described and I told him to open my app link in Safari directly. That solved his issue.

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+1 for this. I had a talk with someone on here previously about this and can reproduce the problem.

Hi @david, based on these follow-up confirmations of the issue could you share if this is something that your team would be open to addressing?

The only thing I can think to do about this in the meantime @ThinhDinh is to direct new users to my own intermediate landing page to handle this UX for new users.

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Update:

It was too time consuming to develop a custom landing page so I opted for this (Typeform + Integromat + Clicksend). Maybe this will add a sense of exclusivity to our beta? LOL