The first developer preview of Android 15 is now available, and more information is coming in about what the software is supposed to offer; the latest improvements planned for Android 15 could make web browsing faster and simpler

Android 15 is set to extend Android's "PinnerService," and Android Police has discovered that Android's WebView can now be pinned to memory At least some of this is possible, but it should be enough to improve WebView's page load times

WebView is part of Android and allows apps to render web content within the app It is based on the same code base as Google Chrome, but means that apps can serve services on the web without having to switch to a standalone browser

WebView and Chrome are effectively separate, but share certain code and resources in a library called trichrome This is important because Google fixed part of the trichrome library in the first Android 15 Developer Preview

The idea behind PinnerService is to be able to lock important processes like Core OS components into the phone's memory That way, no other application can come in and steal that memory and start the original software from scratch

In other words, by locking part of the trichrome library in memory, the WebView page should load a little faster in Android 15 In other words, it will be able to do whatever it does that much faster How much faster is not entirely clear and may depend on the actual amount of RAM available But I don't need to explain why less latency is a good thing

Android Police also notes that Google may have plans to make the WebView API more modular as part of Project Mainline

The only downside here is that this is only a developer preview of Android 15 There is no guarantee that WebView will still be locked in memory when the final version of the software launches later this year The software is still in flux and some of the features we are seeing in the preview may not materialize