Recommendations for Webview Based Mobile Applications on Android

Today's handy mobiles are an essential part of our daily life. Mobile applications are the lifeline of these silicon devices. The present fragmented mobile landscape, with a handful of popular mobile platforms, has fuelled the trend of developing platform neutral applications. Mobile web has since grown in popularity. But mobile web is not a standalone application by itself; rather it runs on a web browser. The limited real estate area of a web browser, with browser controls covering a lot of the display area is a usability issue. In a step ahead of mobile web, a new mobile application type called webview application brings new possibilities like a native launchpad for web content, real estate area entirely for webpage display, etc. Many third party services, like PhoneGap, etc have engineered this technology, with web to native mechanisms to enable developers to author powerful mobile applications, which is otherwise limited with mobile web. This paper discusses the mobile web and webview based applications and its increasing relevance in today's mobile landscape. The paper also states a set of recommendations while coding the android webview.