WebView App

A WebView app is a phone app whose screens are a website shown inside a window. Every phone has that window built in, and developers call it a web view. You open the app, and you are really looking at pages loaded from a server with the address bar hidden. When the app is nothing but that, people call it a thin wrapper.

The appeal is easy to understand. The website already exists and it already works. Wrapping it takes days instead of months, and one change on the server reaches every phone at once with no new release. For a small business with one budget, that can look like the whole problem solved.

The stores disagree. Apple asks an app to do something a browser cannot, and Google says much the same in softer words. An app that only shows your existing pages, with no camera, no alerts, nothing saved on the device and no screen that works without signal, is turned down regularly. The cost is not the code, it is the calendar. A rejection lands about a week after you send it, usually after you have promised a launch date to somebody, and each new attempt costs another week.

A web view inside a real app is a different thing, and it is often the sensible choice. Terms and conditions, a help centre, a long survey, an invoice you only ever read, a page of rules that changes every month. These work well as web screens because they change often and nobody wants to wait for an app update. Linkysoft builds this way on purpose. The login, the lists, the camera and the alerts are native, and the pages that change weekly come from the same web application the office already uses, so nobody keeps two copies of anything.

The useful question is not whether a web view is allowed. It is what the phone adds. If the answer includes a scanner, a map, a saved login, a receipt that still opens with no signal, or a message that arrives while the app is closed, the app has a reason to exist and the reviewer will see it. If the answer is nothing at all, a fast mobile site that people can add to the home screen will serve you better and cost less. Before you sign, ask the supplier to name the native parts in writing. On a Linkysoft mobile app project that list is page one of the plan.