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I am seeing some contradicting evidence to the question of support of WebRTC in Android's WebView, and I was wondering if anyone might know anything about Google's plans to support WebRTC in the WebView in the future.
On one hand, I have read a post by Paul Irish claiming that WebRTC will be supported on Android WebView, and I also see the same it true by looking at Chromium SVN.
However WebRTC does not actually work on WebView and I found posts saying that it was eventually left out (no reason given, I can only guess that Google was in a hurry to put the Chromium-based WebView in KitKat and to reduce complication stuff like WebRTC and WebGL were left out).
Does anyone know if Google is planning to add WebRTC support for the Android WebView, and when?
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The good thing is that the Webview in Android also supports WebRTC. So built-in application browsers such as the one used by Facebook or Slack also end up supporting WebRTC experiences. And if you write your own app, you can use the Webview, a precompiled version of WebRTC for Android or compile it on your own.
Chrome, Google's ubiquitous browser, powers Android System WebView. The Android System WebView app is typically pre-installed on most Android smartphones. That way, every developer that resorts to using it to render internet content inside their app can do so without warning about compatibility issues.
This interface was deprecated in API level 12. This interface is now obsolete.
But a wide variety of other Android applications also use it to display web content that isn't a part of the app. The WebView app is based on Chromium, the same open source project that powers the Google Chrome web browser, but it doesn't include all the features present in the full version of Chrome.
UPDATE: On Google I/O 2014, Google revealed that Web View will support WebRTC only on Android "L".
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WebRTC is not supported in the WebView.
The team would like to enable it (which is why I think that bug exists), but to enable features, they need to be supported across all Android architectures (Mips, Arm, Intel), which I don't believe WebRTC is.
Update: As pointed out below - I/O 2014, we announced support for WebRTC.
Here is a short video on other updates and code on how to get it working on the L Developer Preview.
https://gauntface.com/blog/2014/07/02/webview-in-the-developer-preview-of-l
Warning: As this is only a preview release of Android, there may be some changes.
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