[girvo]

Damn I was hoping this bypassed permissions. It can still be dangerous; picture the Facebook app's permission structure, it uses a WebView (or used to anyway, I haven't used Android in a while now). An attacker could send a link that does something useful, or inject JavaScript into a legit page that when viewed in FB's app (coupled with an FB status worm, anyone?) sends messages to premium SMS numbers... the attacker could rack up quite a bit of money.

This is dangerous due to applications habit of requesting a lot of permissions, often for use cases that don't need that huge API in particular. The problem is, designing a more fine grained permissions structure that is tractable in terms of UI is a hard problem. This also points out one of the issues of androids lack of vendor supplied updates for anything less than a flagship phone :(

Does anyone know if WebView has been decoupled from the base OS in later versions? I know it has been hooked into Chrome now, right, so does that API get updated with Chrome itself?

[keeperofdakeys]

The changes to the WebView are purely about the rendering engine (and possibly javascript engine). The API itself hasn't changed, as any old app will use the new WebView as well.

The actual rendering engine change is from a generic WebKit to that of Blink, used in Chromium. Chrome the application is then a rebranded Chromium, which compared to the WebView, has a lot of its own code separate from the WebView.