Add Pull To Refresh In iOS & Android WebView Apps Easily 🤳

Pull-to-refresh is important for apps where you have content that needs updating. It’s a feature we can use to update the data in our app when we drag the screen down and load the new data. Pull to refresh is especially useful when your users spend much time in the app, and during that time, more data is generated to display it.

Since most of the code you write should be shared across platforms, WebViewGold makes it easy to develop for Android and iOS. In this article, you will learn how to implement pull-and-refresh functionality in a WebView app. We will implement it in a simple native WebView app that can be easily tested on any device (Android and iOS).

Often, the swipe-to-refresh interface pattern is implemented by the native gesture detection API that detects vertical swipes and triggers a callback in your app. You can activate this pattern by adding the widget to your layout file in parent list view or grid View and implementing the update behavior that is called when the user swipes. Alternatively, you can call custom functions on the refresh event to display custom animations.

At Android, all views, including WebView views, can register scrolling events with View.on scrollEventListener. When we register scroll listeners in WebView, we can load more content with pull-to-refresh procedure from the bottom of the page.

On web apps, the property overscroll behavior is a new CSS function that controls the behavior that happens when you scroll the container, including the page itself.

Providing an optimal user experience can be challenging to achieve with CSS overscroll behavior. However, custom effects can be used to get clearer loading animations, while navigating to the left and right is maintained.

On WebViewGold for Android within Config.java, you can set ENABLE_SWIPE_NAVIGATE setting to true.

On WebViewGold for iOS, you can activate enableswipenavigation variable in Config.swift.

Moreover, please consider adding back/forward navigation swipe functions to your web app itself, e.g., https://css-tricks.com/simple-swipe-with-vanilla-javascript/