How to Create the Native Tick Sound on Button Click with PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a good framework to build hybrid applications, but for great usability the devil is in the details. A difference with native buttons is that HTML5 rendered hyper-links don’t produce a click sound with PhoneGap. Such small difference gives a non-standard user experience to your app. So I came up with a small PhoneGap plug-in to fix this small annoyance.

Java code:

public boolean execute(String action, JSONArray args, final CallbackContext callbackContext) throws JSONException {
    if("click".equals(action)) {
        try {
            cordova.getActivity().runOnUiThread(new Runnable(){
                public void run(){
                    try {
                        View view = cordova.getActivity().getWindow().getDecorView();
                        view.playSoundEffect(SoundEffectConstants.CLICK);
                    }
                    catch(Exception ex) {
                        callbackContext.error(ex.getMessage());
                    }
                }
            });
        }
        catch(Exception ex) {
            callbackContext.error(ex.getMessage());
        }
 
        return true;
    }
 
    return false;
}

JavaScript code:

$(function() {
    $(document).on("click", ".sound-click", function() {
        cordova.exec(function () { },
                    function () { },
                    "SoundEffects",
                    "click",
                    []);
    });
});

In order to have the click sound, it it sufficient to add the “sound-click” class to your HTML5 buttons (and jQuery referenced in your page).