Proxy error on Android 6 device

Hi,

I am getting the following error (see image) when running a very basic Ionic 4 / Capacitor app on an Android 6 device.

I think it is because the the Android system webview needs to be updated.
I don’t have access to the device myself as it is with a client, all I have is an emulator. I can’t seem to update the webview version on the emulator and I don’t think this is possible.

Capacitor states it should work with back to Android 5.1 if the webview is up to date.
I am not that familiar with older Android devices.

proxy-error

Capacitor docs:
https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/docs/android/
**Note:** Currently to use an Android Emulator you must use a system image of at least Android version 7.0 on API 24. This is due to the System WebView version not being able to be updated on emulators. Physical devices should work as low as Android 5.1 so long as they are kept updated.

Webview has been updated on the device to the latest version (73.0.3683.90) and this error is still occurring.

It looks like other people are having issues too and it is to do with the Capacitor Plugins. I have removed these for now and will update with results.

Might have to avoid Capacitor for < Android 7.



Update:
I go the app to run on the device by removing all Capacitor plugins.
How ever I still have several issues:

  • I need to use plugins in the app
  • The css is not getting displayed correctly at all. None of the Ionic 4 colors are applying and the style are off. See attached images.

It appears even after updating the Android system webview via google play to the latest and updating google chrome it is still using an old version of the webview.
Here is the userAgent output:

Mozilla/5.0(Linux; Android 6.0; C72 Build/MRA58K; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/44.0.2403.119
Mobile Safari/537.36

The latest version on chrome is 73.0.3683.90 so it is way off.
This is the device:
https://www.chainway.net/Products/Info/42

Any advice appreciated!

Expected/Actual:

So it seems some android devices are locked to an old version of the webview and do not use the android system webview. I am having hard work finding information about this anywhere.

I have contacted the manufacturer of the device but I am not expect much back from them.

The manufacturer are providing a firmware update to upgrade the webview version in the device to a later version that Capacitor supports.

Purely documenting this in case it is useful for someone.