High Performance WebViews
Article Summary
John Bito from Zillow reveals how they cut home listing load times in half while making it easier to ship features across iOS, Android, and web. The secret? Rethinking how WebViews work in native apps.
Zillow's home details page was split between native UI and server-rendered WebViews, creating slow load times and making cross-platform updates painful. Their engineering team built a system to pre-package HTML resources into apps and update them asynchronously, eliminating server wait times while keeping a single codebase.
Key Takeaways
- Users now see listing info in half the time vs server-rendered approach
- First-time users get same fast performance as returning users
- Single HTML codebase deploys across iOS, Android, and web platforms
- Resource manager downloads updated HTML without requiring app store releases
- YUI-based build process inlines all JavaScript, CSS, and images into single file
Critical Insight
By pre-packaging encapsulated HTML resources and caching WebViews, Zillow achieved 50% faster load times while enabling their web developers to control the mobile experience.
