Headless Scraping & JS Injection

AnimeTV gathers anime details and stream links via runtime scraping using a headless WebView.

Architecture Flow

Unlike standard REST APIs, the third-party providers do not offer public endpoints. Data fetching follows this pattern:

Android Client (Cronet) ──> Loads Page ──> Injects JS ──> Intercepts Requests/JSON ──> Maps to Clean Domain Entities

WebView Script Injection

When a page finishes loading inside the headless WebView, the Android app injects custom scraping scripts via the interface namespace Android:

// Sample target scraper script injected into WebView context
(function() {
  const titles = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.anime-card .title')).map(el => el.textContent.trim());
  const links = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.anime-card a')).map(el => el.href);
  
  const payload = JSON.stringify({ titles, links });
  
  // Send data back to native Android container
  if (window.Android && window.Android.onDataScraped) {
    window.Android.onDataScraped(payload);
  }
})();

On the Android client side, this namespace is exposed as an interface:

public class WebAppInterface {
    @JavascriptInterface
    public void onDataScraped(String jsonPayload) {
        // Parse payload and update application state
    }
}

Network Interception and QUIC

Many streaming backends throttle connections or enforce HTTP/3 (QUIC) requirements.

Cronet Engine Implementation

AnimeTV includes Google's Cronet Engine wrapper instead of native Android HttpURLConnection to improve HTTP/3 support and connection pooling:

CronetEngine.Builder builder = new CronetEngine.Builder(context);
builder.enableHttp2(true)
       .enableQuic(true)
       .setStoragePath(context.getCacheDir().getAbsolutePath())
       .enableHttpCache(CronetEngine.Builder.HTTP_CACHE_DISK, 10 * 1024 * 1024);
CronetEngine cronetEngine = builder.build();

Request Headers Bypasses

CDNs protect stream video links using security headers. Request interceptors must append mandatory headers:

• Referer: Set matching the exact parent page.
• User-Agent: Mimic standard Android browser or Windows Electron user agents.
• Origin: Set matching the stream source provider's host.