Both browsers sport “share action sheets” which are confined to sharing URLs on their individual platforms and for opening pages in other browsers. Facebook offers a way to “save” URLs but this is separate from the default browser bookmarking experience. Both browsers provide crude navigation controls for forward and back: no bookmarks, tabs, shared sessions, or shared cookies.
Twitter on iOS and Facebook on Android feature a read-only navigation bar, iOS Facebook’s navigation bar accepts user-input and does more than just search the web. The most popular examples of apps that use bespoke in-app browsers are probably Facebook and Twitter. What do Facebook and Twitter do for in-app browsing? enable Web Storage API, allow inline and automatic video playback). Each also offers their own platform-specific methods for enabling/disabling bits of functionality (e.g.
go back or forward), access to the JavaScript environment from native code, as well as a means for customizing the User Agent string. Both provide public methods for crude navigational controls (e.g. Both are usually created by making instances of WebViews (supported in Android v1, iOS 2+) and by loading either a public URL or some content from your app’s resources, or a string of HTML into this instance via public methods. In-app browsers on iOS and Android are similar in many ways. *Kirk’s completely fabricated in-app browser origin story What are in-app browsers and what problems do they solve?
In the effort to keep metrics going “up and to the right”, it was only natural that publishers would want users to stay in “their” app for as long as possible, and lo! The in-app browser was conceived as a means to this end.* Keep in mind that this was happening while apps were just beginning to gain traction and marketers were scrambling to identify valuable metrics in this new app space. This caused the browser to become the active application, and depending on the platform, may have also required the user to perform more than just a single tap to return to the previous app. In olden times, when mobile apps wanted to show web content, they would open the URL in the default browser.