Building WebView From Chromium for Android

Question

I am trying to follow the instructions to build the webview apk from chromium base. I am running a Android-7.0 build. I finished the compilation process for chromium and generated the APK. I have two questions related to steps after APK generation.

Firstly the library name is different from what I expected. The default webview.apk has a library name libwebviewchromium.so, but the APK I built from chromium (SystemWebView.apk) contains the lib libwebviewchromium.cr.so. I wanted to ask whether that can cause problems and if others also saw this.

Secondly, I am unable to uninstall the com.android.webview app from the device. The instructions require uninstallation of this app and deleting its folder before the new APK can be installed. I get the error:

$ adb uninstall com.android.webview     
[DELETE_FAILED_INTERNAL_ERROR]

I wanted to ask if anyone knows how to resolve this. I saw a related question and want to ask if there is any other approach that doing what this answer suggests.

Answer 1

The following answer is related to the second part of my question.

I did the following steps to make the SystemWebView.apk work (note: the webview.apk was a system app in my build under /system/app; the steps below were used to install & test SystemWebView.apk as a third party app)

(Take a look at step 6 first for taking back up of 2 files)

1. Firstly I followed the linked answer to adb pull & edit the packages.xml and packages.list files (I haven't pushed them yet)
2. adb shell stop
3. I push the two files
4. I then deleted the following folders (basically any trace of com.android.webview):

 /system/app/webview
 /data/data/com.android.webview
 /data/user/0/com.android.webview
 /data/misc/profiles/cur/0/com.android.webview
 /data/misc/profiles/ref/com.android.webview
 /data/user_de/0/com.android.webview

5. adb install SystemWebView.apk

6. I also had kept a back up of libwebviewchromium64.relro and libwebviewchromium32.relro files from /data/misc/shared_relro/. After the install, I noticed that these files get erased for some reason, so I copied them in again (first copying into sdcard and then moving into shared_relro folder).

7. adb shell start

After that I tested a simple app containing a WebView, and could see web pages loaded.

Answer 2

Native web view has many limitations in performance and caching.
I would rather suggest you to CustomTabsClient, a web view supported by Chrome Browser.
you could get it by adding following dependencies to your project.

dependencies {
...
compile 'com.android.support:customtabs:23.3.0'
}

For more detail visit.
https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs

Answer 3

You have to build SystemWebView.apk with ninja -C out/Release system_webview_apk

For more details check this page. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/android_build_instructions.md and https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-android-webview

adb uninstall com.android.webview

fails because this is a system app, you can directly replace the webview.apk in /system/app/webview/ dir, after this do stop && start for this you need root permission.