Photo by Sten Ritterfeld / @StensLens

We just finished a quick review of available options to showcase webrotate 360 product views offline on Android devices, so this post is to share and track our current recommendation.

You may have seen this older blog post about using WebRotate 360 on iOS. The key there was installing a third-party app called Kiosk Pro that would facilitate transferring your webrotate content to iOS as well as serving the content using their kiosk interface. Without such app, the only other option would be to develop a native app for iOS that would do pretty much the same (you would use a WKWebView control to present your uploaded webrotate 360 product views on iOS).

It's a similar story with Android and so unless you have resources to develop a native Android app, finding a good existing option on Google Play is the first choice. And so we did..

Of the Android apps we could find and review, the winner was AWebServer. It's fee with ads that only show in server setup and there's no paid ad-free version yet. While there're similar apps with no ads on Google Play, this one seems most simple, reliable, and well-thought-through. It runs as a service and with over 100k installations and good reviews, it's a solid choice.

How do you use it?
  • Create a new 360 product view project in WebRotate 360 publishing software (SpotEditor), configure and publish.
  • Upload your project's "published" folder to an Android device under some folder you designate for 360 product views. You can do it while online using Dropbox or Google Drive for example or via a memory card on your device.
  • Install the AWebServer app.
  • Start the app and select the folder you have created for 360s via Document Root option on the main setup screen.
  • Select Start under Service.

That's it! Now your folder content is served locally (and remotely on your network if you are online) and you can access it in your Android web browser via localhost, i.e:

http://localhost/your-published-folder/your-published-file.html

You can then use this as a basis for developing a product catalog page or a cool offline presentation for a tradeshow or your on-site sales team like this great example by ACTiVATE.

PS: while we haven't tried it yet, you may also consider Fully Kiosk Browser for a complete kiosk style experience.