I have built a progressive web app using Cordova/Ionic. I have been using dev-tools to troubleshoot and analyze my apps inner workings for the better part of 3 years now. In the last few weeks however, i think since Chrome updated to v70+, dev-tools can no longer properly connect and/or manage the app running on my external device (several different test phones).
I have 4 Android test phones, and the same or almost the same issues are happening with dev-tools when connected to each device.
desktop keyboard and mouse do not work anymore - I can't use either to interact with the app on the phone anymore. As well, on some phones I can't use the element inspector (while on others that does work). But regardless of phone, I can't use the desktop mouse to click on app buttons in the web-view. Keyboard does not work on any of the devices either.
Often, even the native buttons in the app (directly on the phone) won't work if dev-tools has been opened to look at the app. If they do work, you press the button and like 10-15 seconds later the app finally responds.
When dev-tools is opened and connected to the device app, the response time of the apps is now extremely slow as well. Sometimes the app just crashes or I get messages saying "app not responding, wait or close?"
If I disconnect the phones from the desktop, and/or don't run dev-tools on the app, the app works and responds just fine. Something specific to dev-tools is causing all these problems.
The different phones have versions 5.1, 6.1.1 and 7.1 running on them for testing purposes. Again, dev-tools worked just fine until a few weeks ago. I recall various small issues impacting performance and web-view rendering in dev-tools, and now all of the above is impacting my ability to troubleshoot and analyze my app (developing).
My environment:
Cordova CLI: 8.0.0
cordova-android: 7.1.1
Gulp version: CLI version 3.9.1
Gulp local:
Ionic Version: 1.3.4
Ionic CLI Version: 1.7.14
Ionic App Lib Version: 0.7.0
OS: Windows 7 SP1
Node Version: v6.10.3
Chrome: Version 70.0.3538.102 (Official Build) (64-bit)
I can't be certain, but I think all these issues began with Chrome updated itself to v70.+ On a side note, my app uses the "webview-plus" plugin....its an older plugin that enables certain inspection features and UI rendering. I removed it to see if maybe it was conflicting with dev-tools, but all the same problems still persisted.