WebView Security Best Practices

WebViews play a great role in mobile and desktop applications by embedding web content within native applications. Native applications, typically written in platform-specific languages and frameworks, often share a common backend with multiple web-based clients, like Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS. To streamline development processes and enhance cross-platform compatibility, developers leverage WebViews as a unifying component. While WebViews offer substantial advantages in terms of development speed, flexibility, and code reuse, they inherently introduce security vulnerabilities if not implemented securely. Significant research has been performed on vulnerabilities in WebViews in different platforms [1], [2], [3], [4], but there is a lack of a consolidated repository of best practices for securely implementing WebViews. This review aims to address the gap and systematically investigates prevalent WebView security vulnerabilities, assess their potential impact on application security and user privacy, and provide best practices. By bridging the gap in existing literature, this work provides developers with actionable guidelines to build more resilient and secure WebViews usage in mobile and desktop environments.