14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that all Android apps featuring WebView would come with Safe Browsing enabled by default to provide additional protection to users.
The company integrated Safe Browsing in WebView back in December, but this week, Google said that this feature would be enabled by default with the release of version 66.
Basically, what Safe Browsing does is add another security layer for users browsing the web, either from a browser or from an app, on mobile and desktop. Safe Browsing checks websites for malicious content, and if any linked is flagged, it warns users before pages are loaded.
The warning message looks similar to the one in the picture attached to the article and gives users the option to close the website and report details of possible security incidents to Google for further inspection. They can also continue loading the website should they want to.
Protecting more than 3 billion devices
Originally available in Google Chrome on both PCs and mobile devices, Safe Browsing is now making its way to all Android apps which can load websites.
“Developers of Android apps using WebView no longer have to make any changes to benefit from this protection. Safe Browsing in WebView has been available since Android 8.0 (API level 26), using the same underlying technology as Chrome on Android. When Safe Browsing is triggered, the app will present a warning and receive a network error. Apps built for API level 27 and above can customize this behavior with new APIs for Safe Browsing,” Nate Fischer, Software Engineer at Google, explains.
Google announced in the fall of 2017 that Safe Browsing was protecting approximately 3 billion devices worldwide, explaining that its adoption increased significantly in the last couple of years. The mobile version of Safe Browsing made its debut in Chrome in late 2015, while the iOS launch happened in iOS 10 in September 2016.