Does the new Android WebView perform the same as CrossWalk WebView

Question

I am using CrossWalk WebView and as you know it extends the app size of 25 MB more, and the app size after installation goes up to 70 MB!

One thing I need to know, CrossWalk WebView supports old devices, and make the performance much better by using a better WebView instead of the default one, but as I knew after Android KitKat Google replaced the WebView with Chromium one, does that mean that using default WebView in devices running Android KitKat+ is an alternative of using CrossWalk WebView, I mean does the hybrid application performance differ between Chromium and CrossWalk WebView?

If the performance is the same, I would use default system WebView and stop supporting old Android OS.

Answer 1

From Wikipedia

Crosswalk built with the latest releases of Chromium and Blink from Google. These are also used in Google Chrome.

There are some points you can consider:

• Chrome for Android is separate from WebView. They're both based on the same code, including a common JavaScript engine and rendering engine.

• Crosswalk is a chromium web runtime that can be packaged with the app.

  Default webview doesn't support WebRTC audio/video feature but crosswalk does.

• You can debug your crossview packaged project but can not for webview.

• Crosswalk supports:

  • Icon fonts, SVG, Flexbox, and more
  • New monitoring APIs
  • File System API

Now a days most of the devices have at least Kitkat, so performance shouldn't be the issue.

If you are building a HTML5 game or want to use WebRTC for audio/audio calling you can go for crosswalk but you don't need to integrate crosswalk if you want to use basic web functionalities.

For more information Does the new WebView have feature parity with Chrome for Android? and Old WebView vs. Chromium backed WebView Benchmark

Answer 2

I found some information about the performance difference of android webview and clean cordova install here in this answer (I think this will be the most relevant for you) : Is there any real benefit using crosswalk for Android 4.4 & above?

Also while choosing you will maybe like to look at what extra HTML5 features are provided by crosswalk above 4.4 devices as in android webview above kitkat some features are disabled Resource : Why do I need Crosswalk now that Android (KitKat and later) has a Chrome-based webview? question in https://crosswalk-project.org/documentation/about/faq.html