I have run into some rendering performance issues for my web app running in an Android WebView wrapper app.
I have seen some allusions around the web that Chrome Custom Tabs may perform better, due to using Chrome rather than WebView. However, I have done some testing with the Chrome browser on the same device, and the web app seems to perform just as poorly. Given this situation, is there any reason to expect that using a Chrome Custom Tab would perform any better?
Both Custom Tabs and WebView use Chrome's rendering engine.
Even though there is a very small overhead in WebView, due to it existing in the Activity's view hierarchy, that's usually insignificant.
Custom Tabs can offer performance improvements when loading the page. The browser exposes APIs that allow the developer to make sure that it is loaded into memory before the page is loaded and to pre-load the page.
In this case, it seems optimising the web app is the way to go.
