Hide address bar not working - bulletproof approach needed

Question

At the moment I am writing some kind of web app and I want to hide the address bar on iOS devices and preferably also on Android devices.
Normally I do this with

window.addEventListener( 'load', function () {
  setTimeout( function () {
    window.scrollTo( 0, 1 );
  }, 0 );
});

but this won't work now because the page hasn't enough content to scroll.
Now I know this is a common problem and I know that there are multiple solutions, but I would prefer a small, bulletproof solution.
Actually I was quite happy when I found this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9678194/cross-platform-method-for-removing-the-address-bar-in-a-mobile-web-app

where this code was posted:

function hideAddressBar()
{
  if(!window.location.hash)
  {
      if(document.height < window.outerHeight)
      {
          document.body.style.height = (window.outerHeight + 50) + 'px';
      }

      setTimeout( function(){ window.scrollTo(0, 1); }, 50 );
  }
}

window.addEventListener("load", function(){ if(!window.pageYOffset){ hideAddressBar(); } } );
window.addEventListener("orientationchange", hideAddressBar );

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for me. I see that something happens because some elements that have padding-top set in percentages move down, but the address bar stays.

Of course I also did a Google search and tried many snippets I found. Some did nothing, some just moved the elements with padding-top down a bit.
The only working code I found is this:

var page = document.getElementById('page'),
    ua = navigator.userAgent,
    iphone = ~ua.indexOf('iPhone') || ~ua.indexOf('iPod'),
    ipad = ~ua.indexOf('iPad'),
    ios = iphone || ipad,
    // Detect if this is running as a fullscreen app from the homescreen
    fullscreen = window.navigator.standalone,
    android = ~ua.indexOf('Android'),
    lastWidth = 0;

if (android) {
  // Android's browser adds the scroll position to the innerHeight, just to
  // make this really difficult. Thus, once we are scrolled, the
  // page height value needs to be corrected in case the page is loaded
  // when already scrolled down. The pageYOffset is of no use, since it always
  // returns 0 while the address bar is displayed.
  window.onscroll = function() {
    page.style.height = window.innerHeight + 'px'
  } 
}
var setupScroll = window.onload = function() {
  // Start out by adding the height of the location bar to the width, so that
  // we can scroll past it
  if (ios) {
    // iOS reliably returns the innerWindow size for documentElement.clientHeight
    // but window.innerHeight is sometimes the wrong value after rotating
    // the orientation
    var height = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
    // Only add extra padding to the height on iphone / ipod, since the ipad
    // browser doesn't scroll off the location bar.
    if (iphone && !fullscreen) height += 60;
    page.style.height = height + 'px';
  } else if (android) {
    // The stock Android browser has a location bar height of 56 pixels, but
    // this very likely could be broken in other Android browsers.
    page.style.height = (window.innerHeight + 56) + 'px'
  }
  // Scroll after a timeout, since iOS will scroll to the top of the page
  // after it fires the onload event
  setTimeout(scrollTo, 0, 0, 1);
};
(window.onresize = function() {
  var pageWidth = page.offsetWidth;
  // Android doesn't support orientation change, so check for when the width
  // changes to figure out when the orientation changes
  if (lastWidth == pageWidth) return;
  lastWidth = pageWidth;
  setupScroll();
})();

Source

But I am not really happy with this solution as I am not a friend of UA sniffing.

Do you have any suggestions what I could try to make it work without UA sniffing? Can it be my HTML that causes problems with some scripts I posted?

Answer 1

Don't know if it's bulletproof, but it works on a bunch of devices. If you find caveat, let me know.

if (((/iphone/gi).test(navigator.userAgent) || (/ipod/gi).test(navigator.userAgent)) &&
    (!("standalone" in window.navigator) && !window.navigator.standalone)) {
    offset = 60;
    $('body').css('min-height', (window.innerHeight + offset) + 'px');
    setTimeout( function(){ window.scrollTo(0, 1); }, 1 );
}

if ((/android/gi).test(navigator.userAgent)) {
    offset = 56;
    $('html').css('min-height', (window.innerHeight + offset) + 'px');
    setTimeout( function(){ window.scrollTo(0, 1); }, 0 );
}