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Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

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Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#31

Post by perryizgr8 »

aritmo wrote: post #2

There is a misconception that removing Android Webview is "fixing" the problem. The proper word is that removing the updated Android Webview is "a temporary workaround" until an updated Android Webview is released. You cannot remove Android Webview because it is an essential part of Android. By "removing" the package, you are removing the latest update and revert back to the old (and probably insecure) version of And…

It is definitely fixing the problem. As is the entire phone is unusable because you cannot open many of the most important apps.

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#32

Post by aaomidi »

meibo wrote: post #15
exabrial wrote: post #8

How does something like this make it to production? I couldn't reply to any work emails for the greater part of the evening yesterday. Adds more evidence to the case of "never use Google for your business".

You never made a mistake that made it through your test suite to production?

Not on something that everyone depends on that increased crashes by an order of magnitude?

Even some basic testing on a real android device would've caught this

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#33

Post by ProAm »

kevincox wrote: post #13
aritmo wrote: post #2

There is a misconception that removing Android Webview is "fixing" the problem. The proper word is that removing the updated Android Webview is "a temporary workaround" until an updated Android Webview is released. You cannot remove Android Webview because it is an essential part of Android. By "removing" the package, you are removing the latest update and revert back to the old (and probably insecure) version of And…

I assume that this is uninstalling updates, which means that you are back to the WebView that came with your phone. This obviously opens a whole new can of worms as now you may be years of security updates behind. I really wish that popular stores had an option to roll back one version until the next update came out.

This is why auto-update is turned off for me. You just cant trust blindly updating things because there is no undo button for breaking changes.

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#35

Post by vetinari »

chrismorgan wrote: post #18
amelius wrote: post #11

At least you can write/bundle your own render engine on Android, something which is not possible on iOS.

But if your app is now 200MB instead of 2MB, know that there are a significant number of users that simply won’t install your app (or will remove it) because they don’t have either space or bandwidth. Cheaper Android phones regularly have almost no spare space (like, well under 2GB available to user space when empty , even though the phone may have been advertised as having 8GB, and even that 2GB may well be partitio…

Can. As opposed to both can't and must.

So you can bundle your own web view, if you want. You don't have to. You have the option.

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#36

Post by gh-throw »

throwaway53453 wrote: post #25
chrismorgan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your app is now 200MB instead of 2MB, know that there are a significant number of users that simply won’t install your app (or will remove it) because they don’t have either space or bandwidth. Cheaper Android phones regularly have almost no spare space (like, well under 2GB available to user space when empty , even though the phone may have been advertised as having 8GB, and even that 2GB may well be partitio…

Isn't the whole point of WebView that Firefox et al can provide it as well as Chrome?

Not really, though vendors of Android can provide alternative web views (of course). Samsung used to (may still) which was a giant pain in the ass, since you'd see different behavior out of web views on Samsung versus almost any other Android device, but Samsung was too common to ignore, so if you did cross-platform apps that included web views you ended up with platform specific bugs for iOS, then for two flavors of web view on Android—and then multiply that by the many versions of Android you'd have to support, for Samsung and everyone else, versus maybe 2 versions for iOS for non-super-huge-userbase applications (where those sub-1% users not on the two most recent versions are worth spending money to support, because you have so many users that 0.5% or whatever is still a ton of people)

If anyone could provide web views they'd be practically useless, as they'd just be a constant source of bugs, and everyone would simply start embedding a browser engine instead.

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#37

Post by oolonthegreat »

jerome-jh wrote: post #21

Actually just noticed that on my wife's phone: 03-23 14:47:11.393 21102 21102 F DEBUG : signal 11 (SIGSEGV), code 1 (SEGV_MAPERR), fault addr 0x0 03-23 14:47:11.393 21102 21102 F DEBUG : Cause: null pointer dereference 03-23 14:47:11.393 21102 21102 F DEBUG : x0 0000000000000000 x1 00000077a53d71ef x2 7265646f63654400 x3 726f7463656c6553 [...] 03-23 14:47:11.395 21102 21102 F DEBUG : backtrace: 03-23 14:47:11.395 211…

> Cause: null pointer dereference

that is actually pretty funny :')

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#38

Post by bitmapbrother »

exabrial wrote: post #8

How does something like this make it to production? I couldn't reply to any work emails for the greater part of the evening yesterday. Adds more evidence to the case of "never use Google for your business".

Do you apply the same philosophy to the thousands of system breaking changes introduced to Windows by Microsoft or is this just targeted?

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#39

Post by topher200 »

gowld wrote: post #19
throwdbaaway wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the team has Q1 OKR to meet and/or error budget to spend? Either way, it's bad. I am not saying the bug would have been prevented if the team operates differently. Brown paper bag release happens. However, the way this incident blew up suggests that the bad release made it to too many users in too short of a time, exactly the behavior incentivized by meeting (or exceeding) an OKR while having some spare error…

What do you think "error budget" means? (Hint, it doesn't mean "amount of intentionally deployed errors we allow".) Do you believe WebView should never update because it's never OK to spend error budget?

Interestingly, the Google SRE book[1] mentions scenarios where they practice exactly this:

> The solution to this Chubby scenario is interesting: SRE makes sure that global Chubby meets, but does not significantly exceed, its service level objective. In any given quarter, if a true failure has not dropped availability below the target, a controlled outage will be synthesized by intentionally taking down the system.

I doubt there are any customer-facing systems that practice this technique. Just super interesting that it exists.

[1]: https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/#xref_r...

Re: Google confirms an issue with WebView is crashing many Android apps (Fixed)

#40

Post by topher200 »

Tade0 wrote: post #20

My phone rebooted a few times during the last week. At first I thought it was just planned obsolescence killing a three year old device, but fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.

I don't believe that a system reboot is a symptom of this issue, just app crashes. Also, the bug started yesterday afternoon. I doubt this has anything to do with your system reboots.
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