Why We Chose WebView Over SDK for In-App Customer Support
A Practical Engineering Perspective from Building ShenDesk When integrating an online customer support system into a mobile app, I went through a long and sometimes frustrating process of technical exploration and trade-off analysis. At the beginning, I was strongly attracted to several “technically ideal” options. For example: Letting app teams fully build their own UI while I only provide APIs, maximizing flexibility Or integrating a native SDK to pursue the most “pure” native experience On paper, these options look elegant. In practice, as the project evolved, I gradually realized that solutions driven purely by technical ideals often fail to meet the complexity of real-world business scenarios . This realization didn’t come from theory, but from feedback. I had in-depth conversations with customers across more than a dozen industries, including e-commerce, education, SaaS, finance, and government-related organizations. Through real production deployments and continuous feedbac...