webview.apk

I have a very old android, a device from 2017 which is running on stock lollipop 5.1. I use this for class communication and talking to friends and some youtube occasionally. The problem with this device is that it didn't have a webview, well it did initially, but I removed it because I didn't need it at that time. Now, while running some email applications, webview happens to be a dependency. However, it being a system application, it's not possible to install it in a conventional way. We have to hack the system to install the application as a system application.

# Getting webview.apk

I happen to have the stock system.img file on my disk luckily. All you need is to mount the img file as ro,loop file with the following command on to a directory called system/;

# mount -o ro,loop system.img system/

Then navigate to /system/app/ and copy the whole webview directory onto somewhere else. Then from there copy the directory to your phone.

N.B. Do make sure to check the permission and the ownership on the webview directory, change the directory permission to 755 and the application webview.apk permission to 644

# You'll need administrative privilege

To copy an application to a system/ directory needs to have administrative privilege, means you need to have root permission. Only with administrative privilege you can copy the application to /system/app/ and then continue rest of the steps.

# Linking shared libraries

The next step is probably a bit tricky. While the system.img file is still mounted on system/ directory on your pc, head over to the webview/lib/arm/ directory and check out the shared library there. For webview, it should be something like libwebview.so which should be linked to /system/lib/libwebview.so.

# ls -lh libwebview.so
# libwebview.so -> /system/lib/libwebview.so

You'll just need to create a symbolic link of the shared library on the same directory but on your phone.

# cd /system/app/webview/lib/arm
# ln -s libwebview.so /system/lib/libwebview.so

Then the application should appear and probably a soft reboot should do the job, and after that it should start working like a system application.