One of the main pillars of the user experience is stability. Some users may get irritated when a single program to improve the WebView crash, losing their data or even progress. Millions of users may lose access to an enormous number of applications if a critical system component were to fail. With the Android System WebView, a component that many applications depend on to display online information, this is precisely what has occurred in the past. Thankfully, Google intends to improve the WebView crash resistance in Android 15; find out how.
To give you some context, the Android System WebView is basically the Chromium web browser that comes pre-installed with the Android operating system, but simplified. Using Android’s WebView API, developers may have the WebView component render a web page inside their application. While some applications employ WebView just to display a single page, others use it to serve as a mobile website wrapper in its entirety. Depending on the program, a WebView crash might have a variety of effects, ranging from a small help page feature to the whole app failing to load.
Because WebView is so essential to an app’s operation, updates are made via the Google Play Store rather than over-the-air (OTA) upgrades. By doing this, Google can make sure that any problems in the WebView component—like the one that was responsible for the wave of crashes in the middle of 2021—are promptly fixed. It also guarantees that WebView is functioning on most Android devices in a comparable version. It may take weeks or even months for certain devices to obtain the necessary upgrades for the WebView component if Google were to leave WebView updates in the hands of OEMs.
improve the WebView crash on Android 15
However, it turns out that Google already depends on OEMs to provide updates for certain WebView features. upgrades to the fundamental framework APIs that applications utilize to integrate WebView are managed by OEMs, while Google Play has been managing upgrades to the core browser component for years. This is a result of Google’s inability to directly modify the core WebView APIs at this time. As of right now, all that has to be done is update the AOSP code and wait for OEMs to include it into their next releases.For this reason, Google is developing WebViewBootstrap, a new Project Mainline module for Android 15. With Android 10, Google launched Project Mainline, a program that modularizes operating system components so that Google Play may provide feature and security upgrades rather than OTA updates on a regular basis. Project Mainline modules are updated in this manner, as you may have seen if you’ve ever noticed a Google Play System Update waiting on your Android device.
Despite the fact that the WebViewBootstrap public code repository is still empty, two sources have given us an indication of what Google intends to achieve with this new module. Our sources tell us that Google intends to shift a large amount of code pertaining to the Android WebView API to this new WebViewBootstrap module. Code from the following folders is included in this:
- frameworks/base/core/java/android/webkit
- frameworks/base/services/core/java/com/android/server/webkit
- frameworks/base/native/webview
In order to update the code in an emergency—such as when WebView fails to start—Google want to relocate this functionality to the new WebViewBootstrap module. Developers won’t have to worry about any new features or modifications to the API, according to our sources, since Google only plans to provide bug fixes via updates to the WebViewBootstrap module. It is also reported that this module would have some new “resilience” capabilities designed to recognize and fix WebView errors automatically.It seems that the goal is to release this new module together with Android 15. But with the next release, OEMs may not need to include it in their own versions. Rather, it seems like Google intends to make it necessary in the next version, which is Android 16. Although the WebViewBootstrap module isn’t there in the Android 15 public Developer Preview 1 release, we’ll be watching to see whether it makes an appearance in Developer Preview 2.
