WebView DevTools user guide

Launching WebView DevTools

WebView DevTools is an on-device suite of tools that ships with WebView itself. You can launch WebView DevTools by any of the following:

Launcher icon on pre-stable channels (preferred)

The best way to launch WebView DevTools is to download WebView Beta, Dev, or Canary. These channels will have a launcher icon which will launch WebView DevTools.

Note: the WebView DevTools icon does not appear by default on Android 7 through 9 (Nougat/Oreo/Pie). To enable the launcher icon, first change your WebView provider and then launch the same Chrome channel or any WebView app (ex. WebView shell browser, or open an email in Gmail).

Launch via adb

If you have adb installed, you can connect your Android device to launch DevTools:

adb shell am start -a "com.android.webview.SHOW_DEV_UI"

Launch via WebView Shell

Newer versions of WebView shell have a menu option to launch WebView DevTools. If your copy of WebView shell doesn't have this option, you may need to rebuild it yourself.

Crash UI

Crash UI shows recent WebView-caused crashes from apps on the device, similar to chrome://crashes. You can access it by tapping the “Crashes” option in the bottom navigation bar.

Note: You have to opt in android crash collection in order for crash reports to show up in the UI. An error message will show up if you haven‘t opted-in. To opt-in, go to the device settings > Google > three-dotted menu > Usage & diagnostics and make sure it’s enabled. For AOSP builds, you can enable crash collection by enabling the enable-crash-reporter-for-testing flag from the Flags UI.

Tap a crash entry to expand it for more info and actions for that crash.

Note: Some types of crashes such as renderer crashes can show up instantly in the UI. However, most WebView crashes will require relaunching the application where the crash happened so it can be detected and appear in the UI.

Force upload a crash report

Crash reports are automatically reported to WebView's crash collection server. Sometimes a crash report may not be automatically uploaded. For instance, when the device is not connected to Wifi (will show in the crashes list with “pending upload” status). The crash report can also skip upload due to random sampling (will appear with “skipped” status). You can force upload that crash report by pressing the “Upload this crash report” button. After the crash report is uploaded you can then use the upload ID to open a bug report to provide more info about that crash.

Provide more info about a crash

While the crash server has most of the information we need to solve issues, it is helpful if you can provide additional details in a bug report, such as steps to reproduce the crash. To do so press the “File bug report” button which will open https://issues.chromium.org/issues/new?component=1456456&template=1923373 in the browser. You can use the bug report template to provide additional info about the crash for the WebView engineering team. Make sure to fill all the relevant fields in the bug report and leave the crash upload ID in the bug description so that the WebView team can effectively investigate the crash.

Flag UI

While WebView supports toggling arbitrary flags on debuggable devices, we also support toggling a curated set of experimental flags/features on production Android devices. We expose these features as part of WebView‘s on-device DevTools. This is similar to Chrome’s chrome://flags tool.

Tap the “Flags” option in the bottom navigation bar. You can scroll through the list to find your desired feature/flag (ex. “highlight-all-webviews”), tap the dropdown (look for “Default”), and tap “Enabled” in the dialog popup. You can enable (or disable) as many flags as you need.

Tip: enabling “highlight-all-webviews” (which tints all WebView objects yellow) in addition to your desired flag is a great way to verify apps have picked up WebView flags.

Kill and restart WebView apps so they pick up the new flags.

When you're done, open the notification tray and tap the WebView DevTools notification to go back to the flag UI. Tap “Reset all to default” and kill and restart WebView apps to go back to the default behavior.

Starting in M84, toggled flags will be restored after WebView updates or rebooting your device. This is convenient if you want to try out features for longer periods of time, such as for dogfooding or compatibility testing.

Overriding variations/Field Trials

Like Chrome, WebView supports A/B experiments and feature rollouts through variations (AKA “field trials” or “Finch”). The flag UI can override the field trial config, either to enable an experimental feature to ensure your app works correctly, or to disable an experiment to determine if this is the root cause for a WebView behavior change breaking your app. Simply tap “Enabled” or “Disabled” in the UI; “Default” means WebView will pick up the random field trial experiment.

If you find an experiment is the root cause for app breakage, please file a bug, mention which experiment, and link to your app's Play Store page for our team to investigate.

Accelerating field trial config download

You can also use the flag UI to download new field trial configs (“seeds”) more quickly, to verify the next seed will fix app breakage. Enable all of the following:

• finch-seed-expiration-age=0
• finch-seed-min-update-period=0
• finch-seed-min-download-period=0
• finch-seed-ignore-pending-download

Restart your app, kill it, and restart it a second time. Your app should be running with the latest WebView variations seed.

Downloading new seeds requires the device to be charging. To bypass this, enable the flag: finch-seed-no-charging-requirement

Adding your flags and features to the UI

If you're intending to launch a feature in WebView or start a field trial (AKA Finch experiment), we highly encourage you to add to ProductionSupportedFlagList:

1. Add your feature to ProductionSupportedFlagList.java. You can list the feature name as a string (This will be autochecked when sending a Finch change to ensure it's not misspelt) or you can use a Java constant (e.g., BlinkFeatures.NAME_OF_FEATURE).
   • If you‘re adding a feature which doesn’t have an autogenerated constant, you can either add the name as a string or you can follow instructions for how to autogenerate the Java constants: instructions for switches, instructions for features (skip the “Checking if a Feature is enabled” section, start at the “Auto-generating FooFeatureList.java” section).
2. Optional: you can write a user-visible description of what the flag does. This is completely optional and you may land a flag without a description.
3. Optional: See