WebView “flashing” with white background if hardware acceleration is enabled (Android 3.0+)

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I found the most effective fix for this, first mentioned here, was to set a transparent background color after the layout has been inflated:

webView.setBackgroundColor(Color.argb(1, 0, 0, 0));

Yes, it’s a total hack, but it’s the only solution I’ve found to work well without disabling hardware acceleration.

Note that this does not work through setting the background in XML.

This has been resolved in Jellybean, although some users have reported seeing this in KitKat. Check that you have not disabled hardware acceleration, and if the problem indeed disappears, you will probably want to wrap that code in a conditional statement to only target older devices:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT < Build.VERSION_CODES.JELLY_BEAN) {
    webView.setBackgroundColor(Color.argb(1, 0, 0, 0));
}

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