How to make animated GIFs work from Android WebVie

Question

Animated GIF images rendered by Android's WebView do not seem to animate. Has anyone figured out how to make them work? I'm testing on an N1 with 2.1-u1. None of the web settings available seem applicable.

Answer 1

Use WebP format for Android.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/

There are several online utilities available, to convert animated GIFs to WebP format (http://www.zamzar.com/convert/gif-to-webp/ is one example).

Note that WebP is not supported on most of the other browsers so you may need to apply some logic to select GIF or WebP based on platform.

Answer 2

Animated GIFs are supported in Froyo (Android 2.2).

Answer 3

Not supported YET. Read more about this here: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3422

For large memory phones like Droid and Nexus One, the two-line change has been made in Froyo (unreleased) to enable animated GIFs. For small memory phones, the change is not trivial and did not make it into this future release.

Answer 4

As a workaround, if you are using a custom WebView, you can do these 2 things together:

• Enable Javascript for the Webview (Eg: https://github.com/LatinSuD/slidetypekeyboard/blob/master/src/com/latinsud/android/slidetypekeyboard/HelpActivity.java) Like: myWebView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);

• Then use javascript to swap images (Eg: https://github.com/LatinSuD/slidetypekeyboard/blob/master/assets/index.html)

Please note that this is not a solution for displaying GIFs, you must modify the content of the web, and convert/split GIF animations into different files (one for each frame) in any format (JPG, PNG, etc).

Answer 5

AFAIK, animated GIFs are not supported on Android except as movie clips played by MediaPlayer.