Last month, Android users all over the world started facing repeated app crashes, and later, Google fixed the issue by releasing an update for Android System WebView. Now, the tech giant has released an explanation behind what went wrong in WebView and how such problems will be remedied in the future.
According to the latest release from the Google Workspace team, the issue was caused by a “bug within Chrome & WebView’s experiment and configuration technology,” which along with third-party apps, impacted Google’s own productivity applications including Gmail. The team points out that the bug caused “instability” in Android apps that use WebView to render web content, hence causing them to crash repeatedly. But to make sure this kind of WebView problem does not occur in the future again, Google is taking multiple to mitigate such issues.
Android System WebView to Implement Safe Mode
Google has shared steps that it will be taking to make sure future WebView problems don’t occur. One of them is that the software giant will “audit WebView and its related dependencies for production readiness.” It will also improve “experiment testability and roll-out process.” But one of the significant things that Google is doing is the implementation of WebView “Safe Mode.” This will come to the rescue if some issue still slips through the testing process, WebView will revert to a Safe Mode.
Further, the Mountain View-based tech giant also wants to accelerate Google Play Store updates for Chrome and WebView. Even during the recent Android app crash event, Google had to release an update via the Play Store to fix the issue.
