Include the latest WebView in my Android app

Question

I've searched everywhere but I could not find any answer.

Please be indulgent with me.

I successfully implemented a WebRTC project on an Android app using a WebView (that streams videos using a signalling server I host).

The problem is that when I test the app on another Android phone with an (not so) older web browser the video cannot be streamed because the webview does not support WebRTC.

My version of Webview is:

WebView VERSION(22209): UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; SM-N900T Build/LRX21V; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/53.0.2785.124 Mobile Safari/537.36

The other mobile phone I tested my app on has webview witht the following version:

WebView VERSION(4070): UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.4; SAMSUNG-SM-G900A Build/KTU84P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/33.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

My question is : How can I include the WebView Google library in my project so that I can be sure that the user has the same version of Webview as I need.

I feel like I'm missing something very simple.

Can you please help?

Thanks

Jennie

Answer 1

Since Android 4.4 (KitKat), the WebView component is based on Chromium and since Android 5.0, the WebView can be updated seperately on the Google Play Store. If you want to support lower versions, Crosswalk could be an approach.