Upgrade WebView to the latest available version in Google Play Store and
enable automatic updates of this app by following the Google Documentation.
This will ensure top performance when using CHT.
In some of our deployment areas, we’re installing CHT Android apk by direclty downloading app from github releases and many devices do not have Google account logged in or play store signed in. We are planning to upgrade android app from v0.11 to v1.0 in these areas.
If we install app without upgraded webview or without automatic updates, will v1.0 still work without a problem if not deliver the compared performance metrics?
The short answer is that it all depends on how new the version of webview is that is running on the phone. The ideal case (from the perspectives of security, performance, and functionality) is that the webview is up to date with the latest Chrome version. But, we realize this is not always going to be the case.
The current version of the CHT (and the upcoming 4.0.0 release) should be compatible with Chrome/webview versions all the way back to 53 (released in 2016). Basically all of the devices we are aware of being used by projects right now would fall into this category.
The main concern here would be that in the long-term we will not be able to support really old versions of webview (e.g. 53) indefinitely. We are already being forced to do some coding gymnastics because libraries that we depend upon have dropped support for these old versions.