Develop Reference

Is there any alternative to WebViews in android?

I am building an Android app and I using Traditional WebViews to load the web pages. I was wondering if there is any alternative to WebViews which can make the loading of web pages faster.
I read about https://crosswalk-project.org/documentation/about.html but found that it increases the app size by ~50MB.
Also, it only increases the web loading speed by 10-15% only and is buggy.
If there is no alternative, is there any way to make WebViews faster?
Thanks in advance.
Down vote must accompany reason.

It really depends on the "richness" of the web content that you're trying to load.
The standard Android TextView actually supports rendering a small subset of HTML, by calling setText(Html.fromHtml("This will be <strong>bold</strong> text"));
But if it's anything more complex than that (e.g. tables, javascript, css, etc) you're stuck with a WebView. However, the performance of WebViews should be quite good (very near native speed), unless the web page itself is very heavy and slows the WebView down. You should do some profiling of your web content to see where the bottlenecks are.

If you do not need to interact with the page you can use Chrome Custom Tabs. It includes features to warmup and pre-fetch the page so that it appears to work extremely fast for the user. If you use it this way it is faster than launching an external browser and faster than loading a WebView.

Will my CSS render correctly across Android's WebView and IOS UIWebView?

I am working on a mobile application project which sometimes require me to display some HTML/CSS content within the app. The app is coded as native programs in IOS as well as Android. Now I know I can use Webview in android and UIWebView in IOS to display my web stuff, but my question is, will the HTML/CSS content be displayed exactly the same in both devices? Or will CSS differ in rendering as it often does in different web browsers? Are there any common pitfalls, or known inconsistencies? Any help will be hugely appreciated.

Generally speaking yes. Both browsers will display html/css correctly, but certainly there are little differences.
I recomend you K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple Stupid.
Simple Layout prevents missbehaviour.
But you can check this, is a non-exhaustive collection of cross-browser css coding
Good luck.

Is it useful using WebView whole layout in native Android app?

I am currently developing a native android app. My app has a lot of activities. I want to develop native android app. But in some case, I want to use a webview where the entire layout is just a webview. Not linear or relative or another layout, just a webview. All of the images and other things running in HTML. All of screen will run in HTML5.
So, I can partially transfer my app into iphone app or other platforms. This is the benefit of this way to me.
But I don't know. Is this way better? What will the performance be? What is the disadvantages of converting to an HTML5 app?
Can you explain?

There is a very good presentation about this very topic.
Performance: You are adding an additional layer in between, A webkit engine cannot always match native (and sometimes hardware accelerated) rendering performance.
Disadvantages: One is that the API use is limited, you can bind a page's JavaScript to Native code, but not all functionality is available.Though you might want to have a look at capabilities of Cordova project. Another is that emulating complex widgets via JavaScript will slow down the page.
Portability: Indeed is a great advantage, that's why PhoneGap and Cordova are popular. Though many like Facebook App etc have switched to native App for better performance.
The approach you require actually depends on your requirements. This may be my personal rant but IMHO: a markup can be only twisted so far, it can't out-perform industrial grade GUI programming setups as of yet.

Cons WebView
Can't use full performance of device, Since web view form an extra layer.
Web view can't listen all user event.
You can't fully share or save data from your web view to app.
Take more time to load. Other we get all things in a simple API and can be rendered.
Changing a simple fields in page need to load full page again.
Online required, can't extend offline features.
Orientation changes and full screen make difficulties.
Pros of using Web view
One page for both android and IOS.
I think the main advantage is the ability to make changes without the need for each user to update the app on his device, because all the pages are on your server.
No wait for app store approval for updation.
Some Techniques
Native elements TOGETHER with WebView. I think it will be much better, as there are a lot of functions that can't be done with WebView only. The combination of the two is much more recommended.
Rendering from locally, Create an assets directory for HTML files – Android internally maps it to file:///android_asset/ (note singular asset). So you can feed your web view form locally even if you are offline.

I think -by using this way- your app quality will be weak and app will be hard to use because the webview object not having a lot of tools that you can make it be compatible with android. e.g you can't share or save data from your webview to app. whatever that reference on your app what need and what dosen't need, by the way i tried to develop an app with html but it was bad.

Phonegap or native for a TV Guide app

I'm planning to create a TV Guide app. The app has to interact with a server to get the data and display it in a timetable. The speed and UX are really important. Nothing flashy, I just want the page and state transitions to be very smooth and the assets/icons to look very good. Is it viable to use Phonegap for this app? I'm more proficient in HTML+CSS+javascript than Java/Obj-C but won't mind going native if it's the best way provide awesome UX.

You can totally do it with phonegap. I'd recommend using a javascript framework as well such as backbone.js for transitions and such.

PhoneGap just wrapps a native-app hull around a browser-application. This means: the phonegap-app must simulate a webbrowser and its javascript-engine. It does not convert your application into a real native app. This makes phonegap-apps slower than native apps.
I made bad experiences with an app that is scrolling through a long table of more than 1000 items, each of them holding five text-strings and two icons. Scrolling through the first 10 or 20 items was reasonable, but at item #50 it became really slow, and beyond item #100 scrolling was almost imposible.
So I wrote a native iPhone-App, and it scrolls at the end of the list as fast as at the beginning.
conclusio:
PhoneGap is fine for simple apps that need little resources. But when dealing with long lists or pages that are made of many different items, phonegap is considerable slower than a native app.

Really the decision to use phonegap comes down to abilities, resources and performance needs. Phonegap will be slower than native just by it's very nature that it's another layer on top of native whereas native is optimized to be as fast as possible. Then the second question is your resources. If you only plan on releasing to one platform and have the ability to build native, that could make the most sense. On the other hand if you don't have the resources and want to build to multiple platforms quicker, phonegap will definitely fill that need.
For frameworks, there is sencha, jquery mobile, Dojo Mobile (I find that framework to be the most difficult to use) and Kendo UI (newest of the bunch but not really free either).
And another great template start is to use Mobile Boilerplate to understand the best practices for an hmtl5 starting page.
http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile

if you use phonegap, it will be more easy to create the app for the other platformes(android WP7 ...)
but improving it will take you much more time.
because to have nice transitions and effects with phonegap , you wil need some libs and frameworks like (jquery mobile ,sencha touch ,dojo framwork)

Two questions about HTML5 web coding to Android device

1
Which one method is faster to open and use HTML5/jQuery Mobile page in android device?
Use Phonegap or just make normal activity with WebView? Page is in assets folder and App doesn't need to use any hardware component. It's just list of different web page links. And Every link should open second activity and open the link in WebView.
2
Someone says that Sencha Touch is faster than jQuery Mobile and someone else says that jQuery is as fast but much more stronger because there is more abilities to do. So which one is more recommended. Or is it only what you like is better? (Like it really doesn't matter which one you use)
jQuery is much more easier to start if you don't have experience about web coding. Am I right?

Which one method is faster to open and use HTML5/jQuery Mobile page in android device?
Use Phonegap or just make normal activity with WebView? Page is in assets folder and App doesn't need to use any hardware component. It's just list of different web page links. And Every link should open second activity and open the link in WebView.
Normal Activity with Webview will be faster then using phonegap because phonegap takes more time to get the document to be ready as compared to Native thing.
Someone says that Sencha Touch is faster than jQuery Mobile and someone else says that jQuery is as fast but much more stronger because there is more abilities to do. So which one is more recommended. Or is it only what you like is better? (Like it really doesn't matter which one you use)
jQuery is much more easier to start if you don't have experience about web coding. Am I right?
Yes you are right Jquery is much more easir then sencha touch. I use jquery mobile and its awesome. Although Sencha is little bit faster but i will recommend you to use Jquery mobile. :)

In general yes JQM is a lot easier to learn. I've spent about a week now looking through Sencha and if you don't know EXT.js it seems pretty complex. Even the demos are confusing and it seems to be way more programmer oriented in the way things are constructed versus design oriented.
I'm also looking at netbiscuits tactile - but I haven't spent enough time looking at that yet.