A leading US academic will shortly publish a paper highlighting potential security problems with the WebView platform, the coding system used to create many of the most popular Google Android apps.

With the larger attack surface WebView brings to Android, it’s not just about whether an app will crash or content won’t render, it’s also about security.

Google says this is a “complete overhaul” of the Android WebView API, bringing the same rendering engine and software stack that powers Chrome to app developers targeting Android 4.4 KitKat.

Android System WebView is a part of the Android operating system that offers app developers a built-in browser inside apps to display web content.

The main purpose of Android System WebView is connecting application developers directly from the apps towards the different web content, offering the media or other information on a direct basis.

Enhance your Android apps with content from external websites, using WebViews - and ensure this content looks good across a range of screen configurations.

Android has long provided a way for developers to show web content in apps without implementing a full browser with WebView, but the nature of this component has changed a lot over the years. It ...

The tech giant stresses that this does not mean developers can’t distribute outside of the Play Store through other app ...

A Google engineer explained that Android 10 uses a new implementation called 'Trichrome': "Chrome is no longer used as a WebView implementation in Q+.