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 lifecycle event to look at the current URL and save it to SharedPreferences:

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 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