Are Cordova WebViews different from system WebViews?

[jmarshall-com]

New to mobile development here. Thanks for Cordova, and for starting discussions on GitHub. :)

I would love to better understand the relationship between the WebViews used by Cordova, and the WebViews provided by the Android and iOS systems. In particular, I couldn't get the JS "import" statement to be recognized, as if the Cordova WebViews used an older version of JS. Is this true? If so, it becomes a problem when trying to use various JS libraries in Cordova apps. Or am I getting something wrong? Thanks!

[erisu]

Cordova does not have any custom WebViews. It uses the System WebView provided by Android and iOS.

Per MDN, the import statements were introduced in Chrome 80 and Safari 15.

Since Cordova-Android 9.x release, the defined minimum supported SDK is 22 (Android 5.1).

Starting in Android 5.0 (SDK 21), the WebView was moved to an APK so it can be updated separately to the platform. End-users should be able to upgrade to the latest version of Chromium that supports the import statement. But this relies on the end-user to update their browser regularly. If you change the minimum target to something lower than SDK 21, those users will have issues with the import statement.

As for iOS users, Safari 15 was shipped with iOS and iPadOS 15. Since Safair version is tied to the platform's version, anyone running older iOS version will have issues with the import statement.

[jmarshall-com]

Excellent, thank you for the detailed explanation!

[breautek]

To add onto the answer. SDK 22, or Android 5.1 if you create an AOSP emulator and don't update, the installed webview version is Chrome 33 (if I recall correctly). Which means a Cordova app running on Android 5.1, could potentially be running a webview version as old as Chrome 33, assuming that the user never updated their device from factory settings.