Bridging Web and Native:
Using WebView for Mobile Apps
A while ago I turned my back on PWAs for my mobile project. It’s just not advanced enough for my use case. I don’t like hybrid solutions because, among other things, I don’t want to have additional JavaScript runtime and bridges etc. as overhead. But there are other ways.
First of all, I spent some time with Flutter again. I’ve worked with it several times and found the idea perfect, especially at the beginning. But now I’m so attached to web development that I couldn’t find any liking for Flutter.
Thanks to a comment on my last post on the topic of PWA, I looked into using a WebView in a native project directly. I had never done this before because I thought it was too complex. But I was incredibly surprised.
With a WebView, I can bring my web application to mobile devices with little overhead and access the native functions directly. No hybrid framework is necessary and I get the best of both worlds. I can still decide how much of the logic should run in the native environment or in the WebView. A wonderful compromise.
Of course, the native part is now platform specific. That’s fine for me.