Google has announced that it enabled Safe Browsing support for the Android WebView component, a stripped-down browser that comes with all Android versions. So, Google Play Protect brings Safe Browsing to WebView by default in April 2018 with the release of WebView 66. Google has launched the Safe Browsing, a decade ago.
The Safe Browsing API is a blacklist of malicious content that hosts the malware, phishing pages, or other deceptive sites. This was added when API was integrated with Chrome, which indeed is becoming a staple feature of Google’s main browser.
What’s webview in android?
We can render web pages as a part of the application using webview. WebView comes with all features as that of a desktop browser like managing history, cookies and a lot more. Using webview you can build apps that even integrate HTML5 games inside the application.
Safe Browsing added to WebView 66
Previously, Google added support for Safe Browsing to work inside WebView. The feature was added in Android Oreo (8.0) but was not turned on by default, as developers specifically had to enable it in each app where they used WebView component.
But now, Google said that with the release of WebView 66, the Safe Browsing service would be turned on by default in all WebView-capable apps.
Nate Fischer, a Google Software Engineer, said that “Developers of Android apps using WebView no longer have to make any changes to benefit from this protection”
–
Indirajith M,
Android Team,
Mallow Technologies.