Can I avoid the native fullscreen video player with HTML5 on iPhone or android?

I've built a web app that uses the HTML5 tag and JavaScript code that renders other content synchronized with the running video. It works great in desktop browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. On an iPhone or a DroidX, the native video player pops up and takes over the screen, thus obscuring the other dynamic content that I want to display simultaneously with the video.

Is there any way around this? If necessary, I'll figure out how to write native apps for both those platforms, but it would save me a ton of effort if I could just stick with HTML5/JavaScript.

In iOS 10+

Apple enabled the attribute playsinline in all browsers on iOS 10, so this works seamlessly:

<video src="file.mp4" playsinline>

In iOS 8 and iOS 9

Short answer: use iphone-inline-video, it enables inline playback and syncs the audio.

Long answer: You can work around this issue by simulating the playback by skimming the video instead of actually .play()'ing it.

There's a property that enables/disables in line media playback in the iOS web browser (if you were writing a native app, it would be the allowsInlineMediaPlayback property of a UIWebView). By default on iPhone this is set to NO, but on iPad it's set to YES.

Fortunately for you, you can also adjust this behaviour in HTML as follows:

<video id="myVideo" width="280" height="140" webkit-playsinline>

...that should hopefully sort it out for you. I don't know if it will work on your Android devices. It's a webkit property, so it might. Worth a go, anyway.

Old answer (applicable till 2016)

Here's an Apple developer link that explicitly says that -

on iPhone and iPod touch, which are small screen devices, "Video is NOT presented within the Web Page"

Safari Device-Specific Considerations

Your options:

• The webkit-playsinline attribute works for HTML5 videos on iOS but only when you save the webpage to your home screen as a webapp - Not if opened a page in Safari
• For a native app with a WebView (or a hybrid app with HTML, CSS, JS) the UIWebView allows to play the video inline, but only if you set the allowsInlineMediaPlayback property for the UIWebView class to true

In iOS 10 beta 4.The right code in HTML5 is

<video src="file.mp4" webkit-playsinline="true" playsinline="true">

webkit-playsinline is for iOS < 10, and playsinline is for iOS >= 10

See details via https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/