Google says it is working on automatically updating Android’s WebView

Marvellous, so 6 years later they&#x27;re finally getting around to taking mobile security seriously. Too bad for the ~900 million buggy old webkits already in distribution.<p>Of course, this is entirely the fault of the carriers!

Is it too hopeful to think this might be a trial run at automatically upgrading other parts of the Android framework? (I still dream of a world where, when a feature like multiple selection is added to ListView, it&#x27;s immediately usable on 99% of devices.)

Just a plug for my little side project: <a href="https://github.com/davisford/android-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davisford&#x2F;android-chromium</a> if you need to do this <i>now</i> and don&#x27;t want to wait... it can be done.

All those solutions to a problem that shouldn&#x27;t have existed in the first place, aka carriers not giving a crap about their users, and not being able to deploy updates on time.<p>They are trying to solve political issues with technics. This may lead to interesting new technologies, but somehow i doubt that it will solve the issue completely one day.

This is really good in one way - security will not be at the mercy of laggard device vendors (though HTC has picked up lot of speed lately - they delivered 4.3 already on the One across multiple carriers and have promised 4.4 within 90 days.) and browser &#x2F; WebView is one of the biggest attack vectors (considering many apps use WebView), which will be patched automatically just like any other app would be.<p>With this - we now have most of the important OS components updated via the Play Store -Keyboard, GMail, Play Services, Chrome, various other GApps etc. Technically they should also be able to ship the ART like that - but I am not holding my breath on that one!