[android] enable/disable zoom in Android WebView

We had the same problem while working on an Android application for a customer and I managed to "hack" around this restriction.

I took a look at the Android Source code for the WebView class and spotted a updateZoomButtonsEnabled()-method which was working with an ZoomButtonsController-object to enable and disable the zoom controls depending on the current scale of the browser.

I searched for a method to return the ZoomButtonsController-instance and found the getZoomButtonsController()-method, that returned this very instance.

Although the method is declared public, it is not documented in the WebView-documentation and Eclipse couldn't find it either. So, I tried some reflection on that and created my own WebView-subclass to override the onTouchEvent()-method, which triggered the controls.

public class NoZoomControllWebView extends WebView {

    private ZoomButtonsController zoom_controll = null;

    public NoZoomControllWebView(Context context) {
        super(context);
        disableControls();
    }

    public NoZoomControllWebView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        disableControls();
    }

    public NoZoomControllWebView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        disableControls();
    }

    /**
     * Disable the controls
     */
    private void disableControls(){
        if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.HONEYCOMB) {
            // Use the API 11+ calls to disable the controls
            this.getSettings().setBuiltInZoomControls(true);
            this.getSettings().setDisplayZoomControls(false);
        } else {
            // Use the reflection magic to make it work on earlier APIs
            getControlls();
        }
    }

    /**
     * This is where the magic happens :D
     */
    private void getControlls() {
        try {
            Class webview = Class.forName("android.webkit.WebView");
            Method method = webview.getMethod("getZoomButtonsController");
            zoom_controll = (ZoomButtonsController) method.invoke(this, null);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    @Override
    public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) {
        super.onTouchEvent(ev);
        if (zoom_controll != null){
            // Hide the controlls AFTER they where made visible by the default implementation.
            zoom_controll.setVisible(false);
        }
        return true;
    }
}

You might want to remove the unnecessary constructors and react on probably on the exceptions.

Although this looks hacky and unreliable, it works back to API Level 4 (Android 1.6).

As @jayellos pointed out in the comments, the private getZoomButtonsController()-method is no longer existing on Android 4.0.4 and later.

However, it doesn't need to. Using conditional execution, we can check if we're on a device with API Level 11+ and use the exposed functionality (see @Yuttadhammo answer) to hide the controls.

I updated the example code above to do exactly that.