WebViews allow you to display web content inside a native app, but they hide more tricks than just that. Find out what those tricks are!
When it comes to accessing internet content, we typically use a browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge. You are probably using one of those browsers right now to read this article! While browsers are pretty popular for the whole task of accessing internet content, they have some serious competition that we probably never paid much attention to. This competition comes in the form of something known as a WebView. This article will explain all about what this mysterious WebView is and why it is sorta kinda cool.
Onwards!
Let's get the boring definition out of the way. A WebView is an embeddable browser that a native application can use to display web content. There are a two sets of words to highlight here:
In other words, the app isn't a cross-platform web app running in the browser. Instead, think of your apps as primarily being written in a language like Swift, Objective-C, Java, C++, C#, etc. that works more closely with the system. To put this into context, most apps you use in your mobile device are going to be native apps. Many popular apps like Microsoft Office on your desktop/laptops are as well.
If you think of the browser as two parts, one part is the UI (address bar, navigation buttons, etc.), and the other part is the engine that turns markup and code into the pixels we can see and interact with:
A WebView is just the browser engine part that you can insert sort of like an iframe into your native app and programmatically tell it what web content to load.
Putting all of this together and connecting some dots, a WebView is just a visual component/control/widget/etc. that we would use as part of composing the visuals of our native app. When you are using a native app, a WebView might just be hiding in plain sight next to other native UI elements without you even realizing it:
Your WebView is almost like a web-friendly island inside a large ocean of nativeness. Its content can be bundled with the app or loaded remotely over HTTPS. Hosting settings, permissions, and the network still affect what that content can do. We can reuse parts of a server-hosted web app inside a native app, as in this diagram:
This flexibility opens up a whole world of code reuse between your browser-focused web app and the parts of your web app that you want to display inside a native app. If all of this doesn't sound crazy awesome...
...your JavaScript running inside a WebView can request native capabilities through interfaces the host app deliberately exposes. A WebView does not automatically grant arbitrary web content unrestricted system access. The bridge in this diagram represents that additional communication path:
Owning the app or its server doesn't make every document and script trustworthy. Navigation can load a different origin, third-party content can change, and our own pages can have bugs. The app must decide which content can use a native interface and what that interface is allowed to do. A compromised page should not gain every permission the native app has.
This communication commonly happens through a bridge, shown as the JavaScript Bridge and Native Bridge in the diagram. Expose specific operations rather than a general-purpose way to run native commands. Check the calling context and validate its requests before acting. The details depend on the platform; WebView2's security guidance gives one concrete example. Features such as sensors or contacts still depend on the host implementation and required permissions.
Now that we've gotten an overview of what WebViews are and some of the powerful tricks they have up their sleeve, let's take a step back and look at some of the popular situations we'll see WebViews in our native apps.
One of the most common uses for a WebView is to display the contents of a link. This is especially true on mobile devices where launching a browser, switching the user from one app to another, and hoping they find their way back to the app is an exercise in disappointment. WebViews solve this nicely by loading the contents of the link fully inside the app itself.
Take a look a the following video of what happens when we click on a link in the Twitter or Facebook apps:
The recording shows linked content opening inside the apps instead of sending the user to a separate browser window. Similar experiences can use a WebView directly or a platform-provided in-app browser component; the UI alone doesn't identify the implementation. Here is the Facebook in-app browser UI from the original example:
I just happened to pick on Twitter and Facebook since I had those two apps installed and could readily record a video to share with all of you. There are bunch of apps that open links in a similar way by relying on the WebView to behave as an in-app browser.
Advertising still remains one of the most popular ways native apps make money. How are most of these ads served? As web content served through a WebView:
While native ads do exist, most native solutions utilize a WebView behind the scenes and serve the ads from a centralized ad server similar to what you would see in your browser.
So far, we've been looking at WebViews as minor supporting actors in a stage fully dominated by native apps and other native UI elements. WebViews have the depth and range to be the stars, and there is a large class of apps where the web content loaded inside the WebView forms the entire app user experience:
These apps are known as hybrid apps. The native package hosts a WebView, and web content provides much or all of the app's UI. Reusing a responsive web app can save work, but each host still needs suitable integration and testing. This diagram illustrates the reuse idea; it doesn't guarantee that every device has a compatible WebView:
If the app loads its web content from a server, a later load may pick up a shared update. Caches, offline use, and already-open pages can delay that change. Once the new content has actually loaded, we can show the updated experience across supported hosts:
Updating remote web content can avoid rebuilding the native package for every UI change, subject to the platform's distribution policies. Changes to a bundled resource, native bridge, or wrapper still need an appropriate app update. We also need to keep new web content compatible with older installed wrappers. Sharing a server does not make those versions disappear.
The last big category you'll see WebViews used in has to do with extensibility. Many native apps, especially on the desktop, provide a way for you to extend their functionality by installing an add-in or extension. Because of how easy and powerful web technologies are, these add-ins and extensions are often built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript instead of C++, C#, or whatever. One popular example of this is Microsoft Office. The various apps that make up Microsoft Office are as native and old-school as you can get, but one of the ways you can build extensions for them involves web technologies. For example, a popular such extension is the the Wikipedia app:
The way these web-based extensions like the Wikipedia one are surfaced inside an Office app like Word is through...yep, a WebView:
The actual content shown inside the WebView comes from this URL. When you visit that page in the browser, you don't really see a whole lot. It is the intersection between the native app functionality and web code functionality (exposed via the WebView) that makes the full experience work. As a user of the Wikipedia extension inside the Word app, you may never question what is going on under the covers because the functionality is nicely integrated and just works.
WebViews reuse browser technology, but we still need to test inside the actual host app. Matching the rendering engine reduces some differences; it does not establish matching cookies, storage, permissions, navigation, input behavior, or API support. The runtime version and host settings matter too. Here are some common implementations:
We can spend more time looking at WebViews and going even deeper into some of the specialized behavior they provide, but that gets us a little too into the weeds. For what we are trying to do here, staying on the roads and having a broad view of what WebViews are is just right...for now.
Just a final word before we wrap up. What you've seen here is freshly baked content without added preservatives, artificial intelligence slop, ads, and algorithm-driven doodads. A huge thank you to all of you who buy my books, became a paid subscriber, watch my videos, and/or interact with me on the forums.
Your support keeps this site going! 😇
:: Copyright KIRUPA 2026 //--