Deprecated touch operations on mobile apps

Question

In past mobile apps that I developed, I found that the click event did not work as expected in all devices (for example: in games in which the user had to tap/click quickly on the screen, instead of triggering the click event, the double click was triggered), and using touchstart gave better results for what I wanted.

Since then, I started listening to the touchstart event instead of click; but testing on Chrome, I got the following warning message in the JS console:

Performing operations that require explicit user interaction on touchstart events is deprecated and will be removed in M54, around October 2016. See https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5649871251963904 for more details.

I visited the linked page (and the links inside it) and it seems that this new behavior is to avoid certain unwanted actions, and in particular to avoid third-party iframes or ads (my app has none) from opening pop-ups. I tried changing the event to touchend (as one of the links stated "The touchend event will continue to behave as before"), but got a similar warning message.

And my questions:

• Is this something that only affects Chrome, or will it affect my web apps (with Cordova/Phonegap) for Android and iOS?
• What event should I use to replace touchstart and avoid the issues I faced in the past? I could go back to click, but fast clicking/tapping would still be a problem.

Answer 1

When creating Cordova app, you target different OS versions, Android 5 and up has auto updating webview based on Chromium, so that problem will probably affect your apps.

But since Chrome 32, when using this viewport <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">, the click delay should go away (see this article), so you could safely use click event. Latest webviews on android 5 and 6 are based on Chromium 52.

You can also use fastclick library that will "fix" the click delay only where it's necessary