A while back I wrote about why phonegap sucks and how we chose to incorporate web content into our native apps. The open source code that resulted from building several native apps that included web content was the Imbed project. We released the iOS version first.

The project aims to be a starting point for what we think is the best way to incorporate web content into a native app - using native code. In iOS that means writing Objective-C to use a UIWebView and in Android that means writing Java to use a WebView. Yes, this requires that you know enough about iOS/Objective-C and Android/Java to write your own native functions when you want to use device features, but that means being able to follow Apple & Google's directions exactly and not depend on a third party to support a new feature and support it without bugs of its own.

Recently I've been diving deeper into Android research and have created the Android version of Imbed. In addition to providing a nice starting point for including web content, the example html code demonstrates some javascript limitations in the webview and provides built-in support for the all-important back button on Android phones when you click a link that needs opening in Chrome vs in the web content within your app.

Check out the Android version and let me know your thoughts on twitter!

As always, pull requests welcome :)

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