Android WebKit
WebKit is an Open-source browser typesetting and rendering engine that includes WebCore and JavaScriptCore. WebKit has numerous implementations (Qt, GTK, windows, chromium, Android, etc).
The Android 4.0 platform's Web engine framework uses the Webcore,javascript engine in WebKit to use Google's V8 engine. The WebKit of Android 4.0 uses the same Codebase,webkit version as the chromium 12.0.742.130 WebKit. 534.30.
Because the Android system itself is written in Java, then, WebKit and system-related parts can only be written in Java, but also can provide some Java APIs to the application developers to call, and because the webkit of the lower part of the layout and system relationship is not very large, the use of C/s Write. So the Android WebKit structure is clear, divided into: Java and C-tier. The communication between the two is implemented through the Java Native interface.
WebView
WebView is a view module in the Java layer, and the HTML pages that are usually inserted in the Android Native app are built and WebView, including page browsing and request processing. That's why WebView's mirror rate is higher than the Android WebKit itself. Many native app in the development of time, the partial update rate high module, will choose to use WebView to render the HTML page, thus can facilitate the content to update.
There is also a webview module in the C layer, and the WebView module in Layer C is responsible for initializing and constructing the WebView object and assigning it to the Java layer's webview. Then the two will be able to communicate. Chrome
More about Android Chrome is a bit of gossip. Chrome for Android is a chromium derivation. Android's own browser although there are some shared code with chrome, there are a lot of differences between the two, and two development teams have developed them in quite different ways.
The future of Android browsers and Chrome for Android is bound to be unified.