If hostname set, cannot navigate certain app's url - it tries to open the remote one

Bug Report

Problem

I set preference name="hostname" value="site.com" /> and I trying to navigate

What is expected to happen?

window.location.href = 'https://site.com';

should open corresponding application URL.

And:

window.location.href = 'https://site.com/page';

should open corresponding application URL, too.

What does actually happen?

First one works, but second one doesn’t. It tries to open remote URL with same host. And, it opens that URL in Cordova’s webview, not in external browser…

Information

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<widget id="gls.messenger" version="1.0.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/widgets" xmlns:cdv="http://cordova.apache.org/ns/1.0">
    <name>Hello World</name>
    <description>Sample Apache Cordova App</description>
    <author email="[e-mail]" href="https://cordova.apache.org">
        Apache Cordova Team
    </author>
    <content src="/" />
    <access origin="*" />
    <allow-intent href="http://*/*" />
    <allow-intent href="https://*/*" />
    <preference name="hostname" value="site.com" />
</widget>

Command or Code

See above.

Environment, Platform, Device

Android.

Version information

cordova 11.0.0 cordova-android 10.1.2

Checklist

• I searched for existing GitHub issues
• I updated all Cordova tooling to most recent version
• I included all the necessary information above

[breautek]

For Cordova specific frameworks we have

Ionic / Angular / React (Framework for Cordova) uses hash based routing by default.

For non-cordova specific frameworks we have the common:

react-router that provides a Hash strategy. It does state it shouldn’t be used unless necessary because they are thinking in the context of where URLs are seen in traditional web applications, where unclean URLs effects SEO. It doesn’t have a default routing strategy, you have to declare it.

I’m less familiar with svelte but one of the recommended packages I saw was svelte-spa-router which uses hash based routing by default.

Hashes are just unfamiliar for any web developer in current decade.

So I don’t really think has it’s place.

Hashes are definitely obsolete for traditional web development, especially for any system that is sensitive to SEO, which Cordova applications are not.

Part of my push-back is because this was something that was discussed previously in https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/1137 Adding the flag as suggested to redirect to the html file on not found files I think would fall into the same category.

I will develop my own plugin (or some other architecture) which will solve the problem…

If you truely need clean URLs for your cordova application, then this would be your path forward. But I’ve already listed above that all modern frameworks have a hash-based strategy available, either built-in, or as a third-party library. Abstractions can easily be made so that the cordova applications uses hash-based routing while your web portal uses clean urls.

If you think Cordova should reconsider this stance, then I’d suggest opening a thread on our Dev Mailing List, so other project members can pitch in.

[breautek]

What is the actual use case for having clean URLs in a cordova application where URLs are never shown to the user?