

An API for adding new native “plugins” that expose new Web APIs to web developers based on custom native code, and do so in a controlled fashion and with a web-developer approved API (promises, typescript, etc).
#ANDROID APP WRAPPER FOR CODE#
Capacitor is many tens of thousands of lines of code that wrap the core Web Views available on each platform and add a number of features, like: I have first-hand experience with this as the creator of Capacitor, which is essentially a supercharged Web View for hosting web apps that need to interface with existing native code. Thus, the problem with the stock Web Views is that they just don't do enough and don't cover the surface area of what native developers typically need them to do.

Nearly every native developer that we’ve talked to has expressed annoyance at extending the stock Web View controls and then maintaining a fairly complex set of code to host web experiences in the app. Generally, Web Views provided by Apple and Google are spartan and bare bones. Generally, the more established the company, the larger their web development teams, and the more prominent that company is on the web, the more likely they will need to bring in web experiences into their mobile app at some point in time. I don’t want to spend more time talking about that use case here but tools like Capacitor and Ionic Framework excel at this and are widely used.įor traditional native apps, the use cases for embedding web experiences might vary from from embedding an existing web experience such as a mortgage application or a survey, to displaying web-based authentication forms, to hosting prototype web experiences before porting to native. Some apps are built entirely around a single primary Web View instance, and other traditional native apps selectively display and embed Web Views to bring in web experiences.įor apps where most of the functionality and content is built in the Web View, the use case for Web Views is obvious. Web Views feature prominently in many apps.
#ANDROID APP WRAPPER FOR ANDROID#
Read on to learn about our take on a better drop-in Web View for iOS and Android native app developers. Unfortunately, using these Web Views is anything but simple, and native developers are stuck reinventing the wheel every time they need to use one of these Web Views in their app. Web Views are among the most widely used components in mobile apps for good reason: most apps need to incorporate some internal or external web experience at some point.īecause of this, Apple and Google provide basic Web View controls out of the box: iOS with WKWebView, and Android with WebView (there are other options on Android but this is the primary one most apps use).
