Persisting the Last Visited URL in an Android WebView

I had a problem in Android where I wanted the user to resume their WebView session and pick up where they left off. I also didn’t want to use WebView.saveState or WebView.restoreState due to the side effects that could happen. The example code below uses Kotlin.

#Saving the current URL

We can hook into the onPause{:kotlin} lifecycle event to look at the current URL and save it to SharedPreferences{:kotlin}:

val prefs: SharedPreferences by lazy {
  applicationContext.getSharedPreferences(applicationContext.packageName, Activity.MODE_PRIVATE)
}

override fun onPause() {
    super.onPause()

    val edit = prefs.edit()
    edit.putString("lastUrl", webView.url)
    edit.commit() // You could also use `.apply` here _へ__(‾◡◝ )>
}

#Loading the URL

To retrieve the value, we can pull it out from SharedPreferences{:kotlin} when the activity gets created:

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
  super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
  setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)

  // Pull saved URL out of SharedPreferences
  val lastOrMainUrl = prefs.getString(lastUrl, BuildConfig.URL)

  webview.loadUrl(lastOrMainUrl)
}

#Example Code

You can find the full activity with some refactoring in this gist