Google pushed a bad Android WebView update that crashes apps including Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Google pushed a bad Android WebView update that crashes apps including Gmail

engadget.com

49 pointsAbuAssar16 comments

I'm responsible for mobile crash reporting at my company. Normally we see about 10-15 crash reports/second. We've been seeing over 1500 reports/second since about 2:30 PM US/Eastern.

Good times.

what steps did your company take to mitigate this issue?

Wait, you are saying 10-15/sec is normal?

Across dozens of apps installed on millions of devices, some with year’s old OS and application versions that can’t or won’t update, and includes both foreground and background crashes, yes.

The rate of crashes per application session is (exclusive of this event) very low.

Experienced it. Unrelated apps suddenly began to crash. Just did an update to the webview and it seems to be working.

Yeah same here. Noticed it late last night UK time, multiple attempts at reinstalling webview made no difference. New update now fixed everything.

So the faulty version was up for a good few hours?

If you have live update privileges on 2 billion devices, you need better QA than this.

I’m waiting for the post-mortem blog, if there is any.

In my anecdotal experience, this is also happening with Chrome webview. My mother's Galaxy S8+ had app crash issues that didn't resolve until I both disabled Chrome and pinned Android System Webview to the factory version.

still worth pointing own that library-izing chrome for Electron &c would fix 60% of memory complaint issues, and the remaining 40% issues are just fantastically bad web app design.

Personal and cynical anecdote. Great marketing! They got another beta tester for their WebView.

I know you are joking, but a lot of Google development is data driven.

This means that a lot of decisions are done by A/B testing instead of proper analysis and design.

This is most visible in UI stuff. If you wonder why Gmail or YouTube look or behabe differently every few months, that's the reason.

Suffice to say, this confuses the hell out of less tech savvy users and the main reason some people feel uncomfortable with Android but can't really point on any particular issues.

This is crashing Sync (the reddit app) and a parcel tracking app too.

surprised pikachu meme

What is QA?

LOL?

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