Many Android apps have all of a sudden began out crashing withinside the last few hours, with apps throwing the dreaded “maintain closing” caution messages while customers try to open them. Twitter and Reddit boards are filled with reports of apps crashing. DownDetector is likewise displaying a huge surge in outage records for Gmail and Amazon. Desktop Gmail Web interface and Google Workspace services aren’t affected.
As many customers quickly observed out, the problem stemmed from the latest update to the Android WebView. Android WebView is a device aspect that lets developers show net pages internal their apps. It comes preinstalled on each modern Android device and frequently receives up to data thru the Play Store with brand new protection upgrades and fixes. It appears a buggy update may have damaged the WebView factor. Simply uninstalling the Android WebView updates fixes the crashing trouble (via Engadget), because it did for a huge majority of affected customers:
If the problem torments you, open the Play Store, look for Android WebView, and uninstall the updates. Alternatively, you could additionally pass to “Apps” or “Applications” out of your device Settings, discover the Android WebView app a few of the device apps, and uninstall its latest updates.
A Google spokesperson showed the organization changed into aware of the problem and changed into running on a restore:
We are aware of a problem with WebView inflicting a few apps on Android to crash. We are presently troubleshooting to validate the scope fully, and a restore is in progress.
As in step with the latest update posted on Google Workspace Status Dashboard, Google changed into still investigating this problem.
Google hasn’t shared any updates at the restore at the time of writing this article. The onus stays on Android customers to solve this problem using uninstalling the latest Android WebView updates.