An online converter is the fastest way to get HTML onto a phone as an APK; Android Studio gives the most control at the highest setup cost; Cordova and Capacitor sit between them, adding native plugins and a proper project you maintain yourself. All four produce the same thing — a native Android app with a WebView showing your pages — so the choice is about how much of the toolchain you want to own. For a first app, a client deliverable or anything that is content rather than hardware, the converter wins on time by a wide margin. For an app that needs Bluetooth, background work or a plugin ecosystem, Capacitor is the modern choice.
The comparison
| Online converter | Android Studio (WebView by hand) | Apache Cordova | Capacitor (Ionic) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup on your machine | Nothing | Android Studio (~10 GB), JDK, SDK, emulator | Node, Cordova CLI, Android SDK, JDK | Node, Capacitor CLI, Android Studio |
| Time to first APK | Minutes | Half a day, first time | An hour or two | An hour or two |
| Code you write | None | Kotlin/Java activity, manifest, Gradle | config.xml, plugin wiring | capacitor.config, plugin wiring |
| Signing | Managed, or your own key (Pro) | You, with keytool | You | You |
| Native features beyond camera/location | No | Anything, if you write it | Plugins (aging ecosystem) | Plugins (active ecosystem) |
| Google Play output (AAB) | Pro | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Updating the shell | Rebuild in the browser | You maintain the project | You maintain the project | You maintain the project |
| Cost | $0, Pro for Play | $0 + your time | $0 + your time | $0 + your time |
| Best for | Content apps, first apps, client work, prototypes | Learning Android; one unusual native requirement | Legacy projects already on it | Products that will grow native features |
What the converter does that you would otherwise do
It is worth being concrete, because "just wrap it in a WebView" undersells the list. A hand-built WebView app needs: a project with the right Gradle plugin versions; a manifest with the internet permission, the launcher activity and any camera or location permissions; icons at five densities plus an adaptive icon; a splash screen that follows the Android 12+ API; a WebView configured for JavaScript, DOM storage, file access from assets and mixed-content rules; handling of the back button, of target="_blank", of file uploads and of permission prompts from the page; a signing configuration; and the targetSdk bump every year that Google Play requires. None of it is hard. All of it is time, and each item is a place to get wrong the first time. The converter has done it once, correctly, and re-does it for every build.
When Android Studio is right
When you want to learn Android, when you have one specific native requirement that no converter offers — a widget, a background service, Bluetooth — or when the WebView is only one screen in a larger native app. You get complete ownership: the project is yours, the key is yours, nothing depends on a service. The price is the setup, the learning curve, and the yearly maintenance of SDK versions and deprecations that nobody warns you about.
Cordova and Capacitor
Both wrap your web app in a native project and expose native features to JavaScript through plugins: camera, filesystem, push, in-app purchases, biometrics, and hundreds more. Cordova is the original (2011) and is in maintenance mode; Capacitor is Ionic's successor, actively developed, and works with any framework. Choose Capacitor if you choose either. The cost is a real project to maintain — Node dependencies, plugin versions, Android Studio for the final build — which is right for a product with a roadmap and wrong for a portfolio page.
The PWA question
If you do not need an APK — no Play listing, no APK to hand to a client, no offline bundling beyond what a service worker can cache — a Progressive Web App gets an icon on the home screen with no build at all. It cannot be sideloaded as a file, it needs to be hosted, and its "install" is a browser feature rather than a real installation, but for a web app that is already online it is the least work of all.
Picking
- First app, content app, client deliverable, prototype, student project: the converter. You will have an APK before you would have finished installing Android Studio.
- Product that will need native plugins: Capacitor, from the start, so you are not migrating later.
- Learning Android, or one native feature nothing else offers: Android Studio.
- Already online, no store ambitions: a PWA.