LaunchURL tel: & mailto: Android

I am developing an app that fetches employee info from a database, including e-mail and phone numbers. I have buttons in the UI to call or send an e-mail. I am using (in Blueprints) tel:123456 and mailto:person@company.com respectively in a “LaunchURL” node.

This works as intended in iOS, MacOS and Windows (apart from tel: on non-phones of course), however this method does NOT work on Android.

On a website with a hyperlink or a tel: this works fine from Chrome. Just not when using LaunchURL from my UE4 app. If I have for example mailto:person@company.com as the string, Chrome opens up, sticks http:// in front of my string, assumes I meant to go to http://www.company.com and brings me there. Same result if Firefox, Opera or Samsung ‘Internet’ is the default browser. tel:123456 opens up Chrome (or whatever the default browser is) and displays about:blank. If I change the @ in the e-mail to %40, it has the same behaviour as tel: it launches the browser and displays about:blank.

Again, none of this happens in iOS, MacOS or Windows, just in Android.

The desired result of course would be for tel:123456 to launch the phone app and enter that number. And for mailto:person@company.com to launch the default e-mail app and input the given address… just as it does in iOS, MacOS and Windows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I fixed the issue by using Unreal Engine 4.16 instead of 4.18. It would seem the issue is specific to 4.18 (and 4.17). The issue is now resolved.

Of course as I haven’t been able to get the app working on a Galaxy S8 (my boss’ mobile) with a project packaged in UE 4.16, I’ve had to go back to UE 4.18 and am back to square 1 with the same problem.