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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

At least you can write/bundle your own render engine on Android, something which is not possible on iOS.

But if your app is now 200MB instead of 2MB, know that there are a significant number of users that simply won’t install your app (or will remove it) because they don’t have either space or bandwidth. Cheaper Android phones regularly have almost no spare space (like, well under 2GB available to user space when empty, even though the phone may have been advertised as having 8GB, and even that 2GB may well be partitioned stupidly so that you have less than 1GB available to install apps on).

Can. As opposed to both can't and must.

So you can bundle your own web view, if you want. You don't have to. You have the option.

Isn't the whole point of WebView that Firefox et al can provide it as well as Chrome?

Not really, though vendors of Android can provide alternative web views (of course). Samsung used to (may still) which was a giant pain in the ass, since you'd see different behavior out of web views on Samsung versus almost any other Android device, but Samsung was too common to ignore, so if you did cross-platform apps that included web views you ended up with platform specific bugs for iOS, then for two flavors of web view on Android—and then multiply that by the many versions of Android you'd have to support, for Samsung and everyone else, versus maybe 2 versions for iOS for non-super-huge-userbase applications (where those sub-1% users not on the two most recent versions are worth spending money to support, because you have so many users that 0.5% or whatever is still a ton of people)

If anyone could provide web views they'd be practically useless, as they'd just be a constant source of bugs, and everyone would simply start embedding a browser engine instead.

The situation I’m responding to is the suggestion that you bundle your own browser rather than using one provided by Android System WebView or equivalent.

Yes, Firefox can act as a WebView implementation on any Android phone. Apps don't need to ship this.

No it can’t. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView: “GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.”

The purpose of WebView has certainly never been about using a different engine; rather, it’s to have only one copy of a browser for apps to use as a widget, rather than each app bundling its own browser which uses vast amounts of space and raises serious security concerns.

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