Essentially, when uppy is embedded in a webpage, and that webpage is embedded in a web browser, and the web browser is embedded in an Android app, uppy does nothing when asked to select a file or take a photo.
For a quick way to test independently, go to FlutterFlow dot com, start a new project, drop a webview component, then define the URL to be uppy.io, set permissions for camera, photo library, etc, generate an apk, move it to an Android phone, then click on “browse files” in the main page of uppy.io that should be visible inside the new app. The camera or access to the local photos does not work for some phones. Essentially nothing pops up.
The same problem exists whether I use Delphi to generate the app, or gonative, or appgeyser and other ways that can turn a single HTML web page into an app by having a web browser component in the app that accesses the HTML page.
The advantages of such an approach (HTML page converted to an app), is that I can easily make changes to the HTML page without having to re-release to app, and, that I only use HTML/JavaScript/CSS to develop one technology for all platforms.
To be fair, this problem is not limited to uppy but to all other upload-widget vendors I checked out so far.
Please tell me, at least, if there is a way to debug uppy within that embedded state.
I do not think this is a bug in Uppy, but rather how WebView on Android behaves. It seems that by default, file selections in a WebView instance are not enabled and you have to manually handle file selection in your Java code. With some online searching, you find many reports about this with possible solutions:
Some of them are a bit old but probably still relevant. Overall I do not think this is an issue with Uppy but is caused by functionality missing from the Android apps generated by these tools.
For my problem (converting a website into an Android app) Uppy seems to behave better than Transloadit.
Go to webtonative dot com
Set page to be converted to an app to uppy (the demo in the app accesses the camera just fine)
Go to webtonative dot com
Set page to be converted to an app to transloadit (the demo in the app cannot access the camera)
Accessing the two pages directly from a browser in my Motorola Android, works fine.
The only difference is that when accessing the upload demo in the Uppy webpage or app, a custom window pops up for the camera (and it works fine), whereas in the website for transloadit.com, the default Android camera screen takes over the whole screen.