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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.