Google spoke about the reason for the massive application crash on Android devices

Google has revealed details regarding the reason for the massive crash of Android applications that users around the world faced in March this year. We are talking about a malfunction of the WebView service used by mobile applications with network functions.

Recall that on March 22, users of Android devices worldwide encountered difficulties when using different applications. The issue affected many Google products, including Gmail and the Play Store. According to reports, the issue was caused by software errors and WebView and Chrome settings. This led to “instability” in Android applications that use WebViews to render web content, resulting in numerous crashes.

To solve the problem, Google had to release new versions of Chrome and WebView. The problem could be solved by removing WebView updates, but Google did not advertise this possibility due to the high probability of data loss in some applications.

To avoid similar problems in the future, the developers plan to do more thorough validation of the WebView and related processes before launch while improving the “experimental testing and deployment process.” If the problem persists, the WebView will return to “safe mode” or a known healthy state. Besides, Google intends to speed up updating WebView and Chrome through the official Play Store digital content store.