Better performance with Crosswalk even on Pixel phone

Hi there! I’ve been trying to decide recently if I should incorporate Crosswalk into my app and have read that they just released the final version (ie: it’s not longer being actively developed) and that it’s only beneficial for older devices…

However, I recently created a build with Crosswalk and installed it on my new Google Pixel phone. Even on a new phone like this I see a performance and consistency boost. I’m curious to know if other folks have noticed this and if so, why, because as I understand it, if you have a new phone there’s nothing for Crosswalk to do since you already have the latest webview engine. Below are some of the gains I’ve seen:

  • Line heights are consistent. In my browser everything is centered appropriately with line heights (button text, icons, etc). On my phone, without Crosswalk line heights are off (ie: text is higher in the element than it should be, causing it to look vertically centered). With Crosswalk, everything looks perfect.

  • Scrolling is normally pretty smooth, but there are a few stutters here and there. With Crosswalk it’s suuuper smooth and my screen feel more reactive to my touch. Sliders are smoother as well.

  • Oddly, the only time I’ve seen a difference where Crosswalk was worse was in my onboarding where I have multiple CSS animations running at once. With Crosswalk there was stutter and choppiness to the animation. Without it everything was very smooth.

So, those are my general findings, and I’m just trying to understand why Crosswalk would help in my case, even with a new phone. Any ideas?

I’m very interested in this as I was considering dropping Crosswalk from our application. Does anyone else have any experience (good or bad) from dropping it?

I dropped XWalk in April 2017 and fortunately I kind of let a trace of it. If you are interested see following post Crosswalk alternatives

I have to say I’m still very happy to have done that. App is still smooth, boot time is the same (I mean since then better but when I removed XWalk same same) and cherry on the cake, app bundle is super smaller. But like I said, most of the devices of my markets are up-to-date, juste checked, only 17% are using Android 6, the rest of them is above Android 7.0

I’m really super surprised that you noticed differences on your Pixel Phone. Which version of Android is running on this phone and did you install all update of WebView?