Debugging webview for Android in Chrome inspect tab with Expo

I’m using Expo with your plugin for the webview. My Android emulator has USB debugging enabled. It’s Android 9 and the WebView implementation is Chrome.

When I go to the inspect tab in Chrome via chrome://inspect/#devices I see this:

There’s no link to the webview where my code is running so I can’t inspect the javascript and html or see why network requests may fail for the webview.

I read here https://forums.expo.dev/t/cant-debug-webview-in-device-on-android-without-detaching/10153 that I need to eject Expo in order to set:

WebView.setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled(true);

This apparently can’t be set via a boolean flag in the <WebView> tag.

So can you please create a version of your plugin where ‘setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled(true)’ is used by default, perhaps with an installation property? I desperately need to debug my webview with Expo as the wrapper.

[JeremyColton]

After 2 days of experimenting this is how I managed to debug the webivew in Chrome on my laptop of the webview running on my Android phone:

1. Ensure USB debugging is enabled on the device

2. Ensure the WebView implementation is Chrome on the device

3. In my Webstorm, in the project’s terminal I wrote: expo run:android This added the /android folder to my project and all of the dependencies to run the Android app.

4. I navigated to /android/app/src/man/java/com/<project name>/MainApplication.java and edited it as follows:

import android.webkit.WebView



public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
    WebView.setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled(true);
    SoLoader.init(this, /* native exopackage */ false);




}

1. In the terminal type again: expo run:android

It opened the app on my Android phone still in the Expo app I waited for the WebView to open and show my page

1. I visited in my laptop’s Chrome browser: chrome://inspect/#devices

I saw the link to let me inspect the webview:

Clicking the link showed the Chrome inspect tab of my webview running on my Android phone!

[vinayn-mend]

@realfresh Can you explain the steps? I have created a file like this in the root folder. Added the plugin inside app.json file. What’ the next step?