Android 15’s first developer preview is now available, and we’ve been hearing a lot more about what the software should have to offer. The latest improvement scheduled to arrive with Android 15 could make web browsing faster and simpler — which is always a good thing.
Android 15 is set to expand Android’s “PinnerService”, with Android Police discovering that Android’s WebView can now be pinned to memory. Or a fraction of it can, at least, but that should be enough to improve the load time of pages in WebView.
WebView is a piece of Android that allows apps to render web content in the app itself. It’s based on the same codebase as Google Chrome, but it means the app can offer services on the web without diverting you to a standalone browser.
Both WebView and Chrome are effectively separate, but they do share certain code and resources in a library called trichrome — which means there isn’t duplicate content taking up space on your phone. This is important because Google has pinned part of the trichrome library in the first Android 15 developer preview.
WebView is a piece of Android that allows apps to render web content in the app itself.
The idea behind PinnerService is that it can lock important processes, like Core OS components, to a phone’s memory. That way another app can’t come in, steal that memory and force the original software to have to boot up from scratch.
So, by having part of the trichrome library pinned to memory, WebView pages should load that little bit faster in Android 15. That means you can get to whatever it is you need to be doing that much faster. How much faster isn’t entirely clear, and it may well depend on how much RAM your phone actually has available. But we don’t need to explain why less waiting is a good thing.
Android Police also notes that Google may have plans to make WebView APIs more modular, as part of Project Mainline — a system that allows updates to the best Android phones be distributed through Google Play rather than over-the-air updates.
The only downside here is this is just the developer preview of Android 15. There’s no guarantee that WebView will still be pinned to memory when the final version of the software launches later this year. The software is still in flux, and odds are some of the features we’re seeing in the preview won’t make it.
