PDFs on mobile not working

  • Resolved TrishaM

    (@trisham)


    1 year, 12 months ago

    I feel like I’m just overlooking something very basic, apologies for needing to be educated, but since implementing this terrific plugin on a website that offers PDFs of their monthly newsletter to site visitors, the (new) issues added using Download Monitor will download on mobile, but not open (although that’s likely because nearly no one knows how to find downloaded files on mobile phones, users just expect files to open).

    The progress icon reports 100% success on the download, and if I long-press on the link I get the option to preview or open in a new tab, but many site visitors don’t know to long-press either, they just expect files to open.

    The old links, created before installing the plugin, are all direct links to the issues, and look similar to this:

    https://mydomain/newsletters/issue-fall-winter-2022.pdf

    They work perfectly – if you tap on the link from a mobile phone it opens the PDF for reading.

    The new links look like this:

    https://mydomain/download/14587/?tmstv=1680107634

    They do download the file, but then it does not open nor is there any indication of where that file is, so our site users are complaining.

    What am I missing? Any help would be gratefully appreciated!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hello @trisham ,

    Have you tried to force them to redirect instead of download? Also, think this one is a matter of browsers and their settings, as with Firefox I can download and instantly view the PDF. With Edge for example even the old link that directly point to the PDF don’t automatically open the PDF, they just download them.

    Could you try with redirect and let me know the outcome?

    Warmly,
    Razvan

    Thread Starter TrishaM

    (@trisham)

    Hi Razvan, thank you for the quick reply.

    Yes, I did try that with mixed results, I think you’re right that it seems to be a browser-specific issue and not the plugin, I need to do much more testing to see if there is a solution, I’m not sure there is.

    My problem is that for this particular site / downloads, the audience is predominantly older people who are less tech-savvy. When all newsletter issues were linked to directly no one had any problem opening and reading them even on mobile phones.

    Now that we moved all downloads to the plugin so we can track them, we’re getting numerous complaints from our older users that they can’t read the newsletters on their smartphones, they tap and then nothing happens.

    I realize that everyone uses different mobile phones, mobile operating systems, mobile browsers, etc. and that means every person’s problems now requires different solutions and training for our users (on how to tweak their mobile browser settings), which we’re not in a position to do.

    For now we’ve swapped the plugin’s links out for the old direct URLs to fix the problem for our users, and I’m back to testing.

    I promise that if I uncover anything remotely useful I will reach out to you again. ??

    Thank you again for a great plugin, I really do love it.

    Thank you for the info, I better understand the situation now. Allow me to test something tomorrow, I might have an idea but I don’t promise anything. I’ll let you know tomorrow after the tests if that’s OK with you.

    Warmly,

    Razvan

    Hey @trisham ,

    Sadly the idea I had doesn’t work, really sorry ??

    Have a great day!
    Razvan

    Thread Starter TrishaM

    (@trisham)

    No worries, Razvan, thank you anyway. ??

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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