14 DAY TRIAL // Android users were forced to deal with a major app outage last month when Google apps started crashing all of a sudden for no clear reason regardless of Android version and device brand.
In a detailed report published this week, the Google Workspace Team explains that it all comes down to a bug related to Chrome and WebView.
“A bug within Chrome & WebView’s experiment & configuration technology caused instability for Android applications which incorporated WebView to surface web content. This bug caused those applications to crash on the affected devices. The fix required distribution of updated binaries for Chrome and WebView; these new releases were made available for distribution via Google Play for automated and manual updates,” the company explains.
While the search giant eventually managed to fix the issue, the company now explains that it’s making a series of changes that will help deal with similar problems in the future.
Preventing outages
More specifically, Google says WebView will get a Safe Mode that will allow a configuration to revert to the last good known configuration, essentially going back to the last version that works if something goes wrong.
“[We plan to] accelerate the update mechanisms for Chrome and WebView via the Play store [and] better communicate throughout incidents with our users, and provide commentary with our partners on impact and resolution status,” the company says.
So in theory, an outage like the one that happened in late March should never occur at the same scale, especially because Google has implemented a new system that would allow WebView to automatically recover in case an error is detected.
For users, this is the correct approach that should help reduce the downtime to a minimum, though it goes without saying that prevented outages altogether would be much better news.