WebView Rendering Issue in Android KitKat

In my case, in Android 4.4, I was getting a black background no matter I set what and this error message in my LogCat: nativeOnDraw failed; clearing to background color.

From Googling, it seems to be because hardware accelerated canvas rendering is not supported in Chromium WebView. I added this line to the WebView to turn off hardware accelerated canvas and now it works.

mWebview.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);

I ran into the same issue, but I did find a workaround. All you have to do is explicitly set a CSS background for your webpage. Like so:

body {
  background: white;
}

As it turns out if you do not explicitly set a background for a webpage the WebView will fail to draw said background and you'll end up with a transparent WebView.