WebView is the built in web view mechanism for all apps that don't want to roll their own web view, and Chrome for Android is a browser that makes use of that WebView mechanism. Strictly speaking, a browser is just an interface that lets you interact with web pages.
And you're not locked into WebView: if you actually wrote your own, you're entirely free to deploy it. It's just insanely hard to write a web render engine these days so for most people there's no point in the slightest: it just makes your application bigger.
One example where it _does_ make sense is Firefox for Android, which comes with its own engine, because as long as the Android core classes area available, it should be able to run. Not "stop working" just because someone tailored their Android build to not include WebView.
WebView is the built in web view mechanism for all apps that don't want to roll their own web view, and Chrome for Android is a browser that makes use of that WebView mechanism. Strictly speaking, a browser is just an interface that lets you interact with web pages.
And you're not locked into WebView: if you actually wrote your own, you're entirely free to deploy it. It's just insanely hard to write a web render engine these days so for most people there's no point in the slightest: it just makes your application bigger.
One example where it _does_ make sense is Firefox for Android, which comes with its own engine, because as long as the Android core classes area available, it should be able to run. Not "stop working" just because someone tailored their Android build to not include WebView.