If you look at your Android phone's app list, you will find a mysterious app called Android System WebView. You cannot open it, and it has no icon on your home screen, yet it handles one of the core functionalities on your Android phone. Let's look at what exactly Android System WebView is, what it does and why it's crucial for your Android phone.
What is Android System WebView?
In layman's terms, Android System WebView allows apps to display web content without forcing you to open a separate browser instance like Chrome every time you tap on a link.
The difference being that, instead of a fully-fledged browser instance, WebView only contains the essential components that can load the website and display its content to the users.
Android System WebView uses Chromium, so it has all the rendering power of Chrome, minus the user interface, like tabs, address bar and bookmarks. It allows developers to embed a mini-browser directly inside their apps. For example, when you tap on a news link inside Instagram, the page loads inside Instagram.
That is WebView. If Instagram did not use WebView, tapping on a link would take you outside the app and open it in your default browser, disrupting your reel scrolling experience. Android System WebView has been a part of most Android versions so far.
How does Android System WebView work?
Since Android System WebView is built on Chromium, it shares the same code as Google Chrome and renders the websites exactly as Chrome would. At its core, WebView runs in a separate process from the app using it and utilises Sandboxing. As a result, if a website crashes inside the WebView, it usually won't crash the entire app.
And if you've been using Android for a while and manually update the app, you must have seen updates to Android System WebView pop up regularly. Because it's essentially a browser, it needs to be updated with constant patches to fix any security holes, just like a regular browser.
While it's easy to mistake Android System WebView as bloatware or a harmful app, it's none of those and is an important component in Android. You can disable Android System WebView, but that would result in a choppy transition from an app to a website you may want to visit.
How Android System WebView has evolved over the years
The way Google handles WebView has changed drastically over the years to improve security. In the early pre-Android 5.0 days, WebView was built into Android. This was a security nightmare because if a vulnerability was found, millions of phones stayed at risk for months.
Google only started unbundling it after Android 5.0, where WebView was separated from the OS and put on the Play Store as an app. Now, Google can push security fixes to billions of devices in hours. However, that changed with the Chrome WebView era, starting with Android 7.0 Nougat.
For a few years, Google decided that having both Chrome and WebView installed on an Android device was redundant. That's when, if you had Chrome installed, the system would automatically disable the WebView app and use Chrome's own engine.
That changed again with Android 10 when Google split them yet again. Currently, Android System WebView lives as a standalone app to save space while keeping the processes distinct.
Is it safe to uninstall Android System WebView?
Uninstalling Android System WebView is not recommended. However, in the latest Android versions, you can no longer disable or completely remove Android System WebView, unless you force-uninstall it using Android Debugging Bridge.
Thanks to Project Treble, which was aimed at separating Android's core components from the OS for faster fixes, Android System WebView is now separate from Android and receives updates independently. This was done back in Android 10, and the implementation still exists.
WebView might be un-installable if you're running an older Android version and running out of usable storage. However, we still don't recommend uninstalling it, as you're bound to have a bad user experience. And if you still want to uninstall it, you can go to Settings > Apps > Android WebView and tap on Disable.
-1120w630h.webp "5 Material 3 Expressive Features That Redefine Android thumbnail")
