Critical Bug Report & Platform Limitations: Impossible to Implement a Functional Custom Video Player

Questions about Thunkable Issues / Bugs
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Hello,

I am writing to report a critical, blocking issue that prevents the implementation of an essential feature for my application: a fullscreen, audio-enabled intro video without the default player controls.

After an intensive and thorough troubleshooting process, we have concluded that the goal is unachievable due to critical bugs and inherent limitations of the Thunkable components.

Detailed Goal

The objective was to use the Web Viewer component to display a custom HTML page that would:

  1. Play a video hosted on Cloudinary in fullscreen.

  2. Not display the native progress bar or player controls.

  3. Start with audio after a user interaction (a tap on the screen).

  4. Send a postMessage to the app upon video completion to navigate to another screen.

Troubleshooting Path and Attempted Solutions

We have systematically tested every possible approach, encountering critical failures at every step:

  1. Attempt 1: Thunkable’s Native Video Player

    • Action: We tried using the native “Video Player” component, both by uploading the file directly and via URL.

    • Result: The component proved to be unreliable and buggy. On a PC, the progress bar would freeze mid-video. On a smartphone, the layout was broken, occupying only half the screen and distorting the video image. This path was discarded as it is unsuitable for a professional application.

  2. Attempt 2: Web Viewer with External Hosting

    • Action: We created an index.html file with the custom player code and attempted to host it on three industry-leading platforms: Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages.

    • Result: Despite using standard deployment procedures (including correct ZIP file uploads), every attempt resulted in an HTTP 404 - Not Found error. This indicates a persistent and unresolvable anomaly in the deployment process.

  3. Attempt 3: Web Viewer with a data: URI (The Definitive Test)

    • Action: To completely bypass all hosting issues, we encoded the entire HTML file into a data: URI and passed it directly into the Web Viewer’s URL property.

    • Result: This method failed due to a platform limitation. The Web Viewer returned the error net::ERR_UNKNOWN_URL_SCHEME, demonstrating that it does not support this URL scheme. This made even the most direct solution impossible.

Technical Conclusion

The following analysis summarizes the situation for your technical team:

  • Summary of Issues:

    1. Self-Hosting Failures: Attempts with Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare resulted in persistent 404 errors.

    2. Native Player Bugs: The native Video Player component exhibits critical layout and functionality bugs, making it unsuitable for production.

    3. Data URI Failure: Encoding the HTML page into a data URI led to a net::ERR_UNKNOWN_URL_SCHEME error in the Thunkable Web Viewer, indicating an unsupported URL scheme.

  • Conclusion and Question: These exhaustive attempts suggest inherent limitations of the Thunkable platform. Given that the native Video Player component is unsuitable due to bugs and that the Web Viewer blocks all viable methods for deploying a custom player, what is the officially supported and stable method to achieve a professional, custom video player implementation on Thunkable?

We await your feedback and a practical solution to this blocking problem.

Thank you for your time.