smart banner on chrome in IOS

Question

I am working with this smart banner javascript library

https://github.com/jasny/jquery.smartbanner

everything seems to be working well except from chrome on IOS

when clicking on the view button in chrome on IOS a screen full of text opens in the browser. It looks like json reply.

the view button is routing me to a url like this

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id362872995 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id371707711

It seems to be an issue with chrome. I was wondering if anyone else has seen this issue.

I have currently worked around it by not displaying the smart banner if browsings in chrome on IOS

Looking at the header information it appears that chrome is not handling the header information correctly

x-apple-lok-response-date: Thu May 30 08:43:40 PDT 2013
x-apple-translated-wo-url: /WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=362872995&cc=us
x-apple-orig-url-path: /us/app/id362872995
x-apple-application-site: ST11
apple-timing-app: 122 ms
x-apple-aka-ttl: Generated Thu May 30 08:43:40 PDT 2013, Expires Thu May 30 08:44:40 PDT 2013, TTL 60s
x-apple-application-instance: 2126047
x-webobjects-loadaverage: 0
x-apple-jingle-correlation-key: JZ6JKEFVAVIEA
X-Apple-Partner: origin.0

Answer 1

I came across the same problem so instead of using https, I tried itms// or itms-app// . They didn't work as well. But then I tried itmss://, and it worked.

So solution is:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id371707711

needs to be

itmss://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id371707711

Answer 2

This is a bug on itunes.apple.com, returning the wrong content for Chrome for iOS's user agent (easily tested with a tool that lets you request content with different User-Agent headers). The best thing to do would be to report the problem to Apple so that they fix their servers.