Comrade stoutner about webview

Apps
2

@cafisho

I concur with your desire to run a completely open source version of Android. Let me give you some information about WebView.

  1. Android’s WebView is open source, unlike many of the other components produced by Google, like Google Play Services, Google Docs, Play Store, etc. Since Android 4.4, it has been built from the same source code as Chromium. See Build Instructions (Android WebView).

  2. Android has a number of core views that are used by programs to display information on the screen. These include TextView, ImageView, Spinner, EditText, and WebView. WebView is used by many programs that are not browsers to display formatted HTML. For example, many programs use WebView to display the About section of the app, or to render documentation or instructions.

  3. Some ROMs deliver a forked WebView. For example, LineageOS started shipping a forked WebView in January 2017: Switch to our chromium-webview fork · LineageOS/android@b2ae115 · GitHub. However, forking WebView can be a complicated process, and in doing so they somehow broke the ability of their WebView to clear the cache: Feature #114: Manually delete the entire private `cache` directory. - Privacy Browser Android - Stoutner - Redmine.

  4. Because WebView is one of the parts of Android that is most susceptible to security problems, and because most OEM’s take forever to release new versions of Android, beginning with Android 5.0 Google started shipping updates to WebView in APK form on Google Play. Basically every six weeks or so they update the Android Open Source Code, build a new APK for WebView, and distribute it to get the latest security updates out to end user devices. Because WebView is built on the same code base as Chromium, the release of these updates corresponds with the releases of Chrome.

  5. I have written more about the history of WebView on this forum. WebKit, AOSP/Google Webview, Gecko

  6. I am planning to fork WebView myself, which will be called Privacy WebView. February 2017 Roadmap – Stoutner But it will probably be several years before I am in a position to do so. The end result will be published as a separate APK that other apps can use instead of the system WebView if they desire to do so (or for ROMs to distribute as their system WebView).

  7. To restore the Android WebView files to your system, you could build them from source following the instructions in the link above, but it is probably easier to just install a pre-built APK. You can use Yalp Store (https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.github.yeriomin.yalpstore) to download the Android System WebView that Google provides.