HTML5 audio on iOS4 iPhone offline Web app does not play?

Question

I built an offline Web app (at www.chirp.com) that caches itself when bookmarked on the desktop. Testing on the iPhone4 in airplane mode shows that the program runs without a network connection (except for Google map access of course). But the mp3 sound files do not play in this mode. Is there a problem with the audio tag when running in offline mode? The sound files are included in the manifest file, so they should be cached with the other files. Image files are still shown for instance.

How about if I use PhoneGap to create an iPhone app from this webapp? Will the sound files be included in the resulting binary load? In other words will the time delay, of online download of the small mp3 files each time the app is run and the sound is requested, be removed?

Answer 1

It is a bug or design decision on iOS to silently disallow caching of audio resources.

See this answer for more detail.

Using PhoneGap should work because the audio files will be present locally.