iOS Safari's WebSockets implementation doesn't work with self signed certs

I’m building a Node application hosted on a Raspberry Pi, that will not be connected to the internet. A user will interface with the application through the browser on their phone. The application calls the browser for its GPS coordinates using the HTML Geolocation API.

In iOS, the HTML Geolocation API only works for HTTPS sites. I found an excellent post on Stackoverflow for creating a self signed cert that works in most browsers. I created the cert, added it to my desktop and phone. HTTPS worked great.

I first tried the Node ws websocket library, and the Node application would call out to the browser to fetch GPS coordinates when it needed them.

The application worked great in Firefox and Chrome, but it would not work in the iOS browser. If I dropped to HTTP (vs HTTPS) and WS (vs WSS), it worked fine. For some reason, the iOS browser accepted the cert for HTTPS, but not WSS. Unfortunately, I needed HTTPS to use Geolocation.

I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up moving my application to Socket.IO, which has a fallback method to HTTPS polling if a websocket connection cannot be established. This worked for my scenario. If you need a websocket like capability and have to use self signed certificates on iOS, try Socket.IO.