CEF for Android

The Chromium engine, inside your app

Cefrium is a port of the Chromium Embedded Framework to native Android. Your app carries a full Chromium engine instead of borrowing the system WebView, so every device renders the same way and the engine changes when you publish, not when the device decides.

Quickstart Kiosks and POS Source

Tracks upstream Chromiumfor CVE parity, bumped per release

LGPL-3.0-or-laterCEF and Chromium are BSD

Maven Centraland a signed Codeberg mirror

arm64 + x86_64multi-process on Android

Same page, two engines, one device

The difference, measured rather than claimed

A page that detects its own capabilities, rendered by both engines on the same tablet at the same moment. Nothing is asserted by the app; every verdict is computed by the engine showing it.

Capability report in Cefrium: 24 of 30 verified working

The same report in the system WebView: 20 of 30 verified working

The argument for pinning is predictability, not freshness: one engine across a fleet, changing only when you ship, rather than whatever each device happens to carry on the day. A current phone may well have a recent WebView; the gap that shows up regardless is in capability, because the platform withholds the payment, credential and peripheral APIs from it -- and it widens on the old hardware kiosks actually run on, where the WebView stopped updating years ago and cannot be updated.

What you get that a WebView will not give you

A pinned engine

The same Chromium in your APK on every device. No silent swap underneath a shipped app, no fleet of engine versions to certify.

Off-screen rendering

Pixels delivered to your own buffer through OnPaint: compose the web into a game, a 3D scene or a PDF instead of into a view.

Every request, yours

CefRequestHandler sees them all, on every API level. Block, rewrite, serve from a custom protocol, or inspect.

Platform capabilities

Payment Request, passkeys via the Credential Manager, Web NFC, barcode detection, Bluetooth and USB -- the ones the WebView does not expose.

The modern web platform

Because it is the modern web engine: scroll-driven animations, view transitions, container queries, WebGPU.

An auditable binary

Two documented background calls, both switchable, and a written list of what the engine does not send. The audit.

Where it earns its weight: dedicated hardware

A self-checkout kiosk whose interface is rendered by the engine — Self-checkout: the whole interface is a page, in a native shell.

On a kiosk, a POS lane or a head unit the system WebView is a liability: it is replaced underneath your app, it differs on every model, you cannot state what it contacts, and on old units it stopped updating years ago and cannot be updated. Those are not annoyances, they are field incidents on hardware you may not be able to reach.

The samples are working apps, not screenshots: a checkout with a real Payment Request flow, an engine comparison you can run yourself, an old tablet reused as a car head unit, and a compliance screen that shows what the binary contacts.

Kiosks, POS and in-vehicle

Against the alternatives

Capability	Cefrium	System WebView	GeckoView	Custom Tabs
Embeddable in your own UI	Yes	Yes	Yes	No, opens an external browser
Engine	Chromium, pinned in your APK	Chromium, whatever the OS has	Gecko, pinned	Chromium, whatever Chrome is
Off-screen rendering to a buffer	Yes, OnPaint	No	No	No
Multi-process control	Yes	No	Yes	n/a
Request interception	CefRequestHandler, every API level	shouldInterceptRequest, limited	Content blocking, limited	No
Payment Request, passkeys, Web NFC	Yes	No	Partial	Yes, outside your app
Web Bluetooth / WebUSB	Yes, with your chooser	No	No	No
Web Serial	Exposed, no Android backend	No	No	No
Footprint	Large: a full engine per app	Shared with the system	Large	None

The last two rows are there on purpose. Web Serial is exposed but has no Android backend, so a serial printer is not addressable from the page; and a Cefrium app is big, because it carries an engine. If the system WebView meets your needs, use it -- this is for the cases where it cannot.

Get started

Add the dependency

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.cefrium:cefrium-sdk:0.9.2'
}

Published to Maven Central and a signed Codeberg mirror. A libre variant without proprietary codecs is published alongside.

Show a page

CefriumWebView(
    url = "https://example.com",
    modifier = Modifier.fillMaxSize()
)

That is the whole integration. Full steps, including the JDK and Gradle versions, in the Quickstart.

See it running

An in-vehicle unit where the radio keeps playing while the navigation map is used: two engines' worth of work in one app, on real sites.

Why this matters ->

Built on other people's work

Cefrium is a port of the Chromium Embedded Framework, which Marshall Greenblatt started in 2008 and which runs inside a great deal of software you already use. The engine tracks upstream Chromium releases, so it inherits their security fixes; every release ships a GPG-signed SHA256SUMS, and the known limitations are written down next to the features rather than left out. See About and Releases.