The notifications, when tapped, did not open apps giving troubles to users. And these inaccessible apps include important ones such as Google Pay, Gmail, Google Chrome among others. Google took note of this issue almost instantly and found the culprit.
Right after these apps began crashing on Android phones, people took to DownDetector and Reddit to see the intensity of this issue. No wonder, a large number of Android users were complaining of their Android apps going kaput for no reason. Google’s Workspace Cloud Status Dashboard also did confirm the outage that several Android apps were facing. And the culprit turned out to be Android’s WebView app. And there is, unfortunately, no solution as of now. Google, however, did say that it is working on a fix for this issue as soon as possible.
Since Android is the most used mobile platform, it nearly affected all users no matter what brand they use. Samsung phones were the worst-hit by this issue. The problem got so severe over time that Samsung had to recommend its users to uninstall the WebView app to avoid crashes. In a reply to an affected user, Samsung’s US support said, “Please remove the Webview Update and then restart the phone. Here are the steps: Go settings > apps > tap the three dots in the top right corner > show system apps > search for Android System WebView > select Uninstall updates.” Xiaomi, too, posted a note on its forum to intimate users about the issue, asking them to uninstall or disable Android WebView on their phone.
On DownDetector.com, several users said the Google app is crashing repeatedly on their Android phone, which makes sense because the WebView issue seems to have impacted Google apps mostly. But, surprisingly, some other users have even flagged issues where certain things such as adding people to the Hangouts group or searching for Wikipedia information is not ending up well. According to these users, there are anomalies in how these processes are normally showed to users. Some users even said they were logged out of Gmail or YouTube app on their phone following the issue.Live TV
The underlying reason for Android apps crashing yesterday was a buggy update to the Android System WebView app. Google rolled out an update yesterday, after which unrelated Android apps started crashing for some users.
Update: Google has fixed the problem by pushing updates for both Android WebView and Chrome apps. The Android WebView version 89.0.4389.105 includes the fix, so now your apps are not likely to crash on your phone. You would also need to update Google Chrome to the latest version. The updates are available in Google Play Store. A Google spokesperson told India Today Tech, “We have resolved the issue with WebView that caused some apps on Android to crash for some users. Updating Android System WebView and Google Chrome via Google Play should now resolve the issue.”
Previously, in a statement, a Google spokesperson said, “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update, detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.” Google also advised the affected users to use the web versions of important services, such as Gmail. “Affected users can use the desktop Gmail Web interface instead of the Gmail Android app,” it said.
