File upload in Opera Mini and Safari on iPhone

I have been spending some of my time lately working on a application that will be partly used on mobile devices. The intention is to capture a photo and upload it from a mobile device. We are using Flickr to upload and store the photos through their APIs and to also retrieve them for a different part of the application.

Early on in the development of the application, to test the functionality we simply used the web browsers on our desktop computers, and we then tested the application in mobile devices once we were confident it met the requirements. We assumed that the web browsers on mobile devices wouldn’t be too much different from those found on desktop computer. We were wrong.

We first tested the application on an iPhone and iPod Touch using Safari that comes pre-installed on the devices. After a small hickup of connecting to the local network we were soon able to view the development build of the application on the Apple mobile devices. It looked as we anticipated, expect for one key difference; the input type file was disabled. This rendered the application useless as the user won’t be able to upload a photo. We found the same when using Opera Mini on both S60 and Windows Mobile devices.

Though we can’t confirm the reason why the input type file field is disabled within Safari on Apple mobile devices, we expect that it is to do with Apple restricting access to the file structure on their devices. As for Opera Mini, a quick Google suggests that it is to do with security as all the websites accessed using the web browser are passed through a proxy before being served to the mobile device.

We are currently working on a solution, one of which is to ask the user to send their photo via email from their mobile device. Not ideal but better than nothing.

Update: File uploads and downloads aren’t supported in Safari on the iPhone
On phones with JSR-75, you can now upload and download files using Opera Mini 4.1, without being re-routed to your phone’s native browser.

3 comments to “File upload in Opera Mini and Safari on iPhone”

With such restrictions placed on mobile browsing how on earth are they going to get people to accept they can utilise their mobile for the web in the same way they can their PC.

Kean at 9.16 am
on Friday 20th June 2008

Yeah, it’s strange how on Apple’s website it states, “iPhone features Safari — the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device. And with 3G and Wi-Fi, you can browse the real Internet really fast.”

More advanced than the default web browser that comes installed on my Nokia S60 device that allows file upload? I guess it depends on where Apple see there being advancement over the other web browsers. They do have a history a creating a lot of ‘gloss’ (eye candy) for a limited feature set.

Scott Mallinson at 9.43 am
on Friday 20th June 2008

I was rather amazed when my wife found that not only can she not print her photos via bluetooth on my bluetooth printer (which my N95 does no problem) she also can’t upload them to Flickr to print on the PC (which my N95 does also). Load of Pants!

Nigel at 1.36 am
on Saturday 23rd August 2008