14 DAY TRIAL // According to Daniel Pasco's post on Quartz, Apple has removed WebViews from Apple TV's tvOS, which means that developers will have to create their native components to render web content.
A WebView is essentially a browser wrapper used by an application to embed and render web content within its interface. Furthermore, WebViews can also be used to load full-fledged web apps on a client app designed to run on a desktop or mobile platform.
In Apple's case, WebViews are implemented using the UIWebView class, which is designed to help developers create web-enabled apps without having to code their content rendering elements.
Why is this a good thing? For three reasons. First of all, the WebView-less tvOS apps will have to display Internet content using custom designed rendering components that will display it a lot better on a large 1080p screen.
Second, they will be more secure, given that using no WebViews means that absolutely no content will be loaded and displayed on your Apple TV's screen with the help of exploitable browser wrappers.
Third, loading and rendering web content within an app with the help of WebViews is not as fast as doing it using the native apps.
Native Apple TV apps translate into better user experience
Even if restricting the way Apple TV apps load and display content is a very good idea, tvOS developers face quite a number of extra hurdles when creating new apps because most applications (on both desktop and mobile platforms) make use of WebViews for performing the vast majority of web-related tasks.
The nice part in all this is that, although forced by Apple to do it, tvOS developers will have to create Apple TV apps without using shortcuts like WebViews.
Moreover, developing native apps on an Internet-connected device like the Apple TV is preferable to running WebView-enabled apps that will at one moment in time no longer be able to display web content and web apps correctly because they come bundled with older WebViews versions.
All in all, even though it might seem quite unnecessary to a number of developers, making sure that the Apple TV user will only be able to use native apps will translate into a speed and security boost for the entire platform.
