
For "built-in" they meant built-in WebSQL support in the WebView. That quote is ambiguous and no longer in the docs. For devices that don't have storage support, Cordova's implementation should be compatible with the W3C specification. For those devices, the built-in support is used instead of replacing it with Cordova's implementation. Some devices already provide an implementation of this spec. So in a Cordova app, once it is loaded, when you call openDatabase you are actually calling a new function that Cordova has placed in the windows object overriding the old standard one. The app runs in a WebView so it should be using WebSQL, but in Android the plugin overrides the API and implants into the window object new functions that might default to a different implementation, rather than the browser API. Then we have that Android independently supports SQLite to be used from Java APIs as one of its main persistence mechanisms.Ĭordova is special. In Android, browsers and WebViews support WebSQL, along with local storage and session storage from the first versions, and also IndexedDB since KitKat. Most browsers implement the specification using SQLite.

But it is available in most desktop and mobile browsers. WebSQL ( window.openDatabase) is a deprecated web standard.
