Question

I am new with Android programming and I am investigation the various approaches to built an app. Right now I am learning native app development using Eclipse and ADT but I also wish to look at webviews and their possibilities. Either done directly using Eclipse/ADT or via tools such as PhoneGap.

I know the pros and cons of webviews, but to better learn under what circumstances they are appropriate and likewise where they fail, I would like to analyze various existing apps and check if they are built upon a webview or programmed natively.

The thing is that I sometimes have a feeling that a given app is a webview because the look and feel is a bit different, but on the other hand perhaps the developers simply chose that look for some reason.

So, can I somehow determine if an app is made from a webview?

Answer 1

If you have the source code to the app, look at the source code.

If you do not have the source code for the app, see if it has an About menu or something that indicates what they used, or see if the Web site for the app discloses how they wrote it.

I would venture that 95% or more of Android apps are native. Of the remaining 5%, the vast majority that use WebView do so to simply wrap an existing Web site but have it “be an app” for marketing purposes. While PhoneGap is a very slick tool, IMHO only a small percentage of Android apps on the Market use it or similar WebView-based technologies (e.g., Rhodes). That percentage will likely grow over the next few years, particularly as people use PhoneGap to do cross-platform development, or wrap an HTML5 Web app for offline use.