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

xda-developers.com

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

#21

Post by jerome-jh »

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 21102 21102 F DEBUG : #00 pc 00000000034521d0 /data/app/com.android.chrome-xLjRNvGCAeF2ZEpHu2gC4g==/base.apk (offset 0xa0f000)

Pretty bad. Affecting various apps including GMail. Solved by updating Chrome. Luckily for them (and us) Google Play was not affected.

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

#23

Post by room500 »

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?

That is a strawman argument. Of course WebView should update. The question is whether the structure of incentives contributed to a risky release.

If you "play the game", an error budget causes your releases to become riskier and riskier as the budget grows. This is optimal because a riskier release allows you to accelerate changes, allowing you to hit other OKR.

The issue is that this will eventually cause very risky releases (where you would slow down otherwise). In a sense, an error budget does eventually become "amount of intentionally deployed errors" because you are incentivized to increase risk until an error does appear.

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

#24

Post by DoomHotel »

I wonder if Google's QA is getting worse. I had a broken Android Google Maps update last week where street view had multiple severe bugs: it didn't even show the blue lines when enabling the street view layer, split screen didn't show the marker for the virtual observer's location, and tapping in the map in split screen just rotated the view instead of moving the viewer to the new location. Something this broken should never, ever make it out the door.

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

#25

Post by throwaway53453 »

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…

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

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

#26

Post by DoomHotel »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #16
numpad0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No action required if you’re not experiencing issues. If you’re affected and not able to update, trying to “uninstall updates” for “Android System WebView” will revert it to ROM-included unaffected version and solve it.

That sounds very risky, since untrusted code shown in any webview can then exploit long fixed chrome bugs.

I uninstalled the updates and was then able to install the March 22 version. It didn't offer any update until I did that.

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

#27

Post by meibo »

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?

Yes, Firefox can act as a WebView implementation on any Android phone. Apps don't need to ship this.

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

#28

Post by b0afc375b5 »

DoomHotel wrote: post #24

I wonder if Google's QA is getting worse. I had a broken Android Google Maps update last week where street view had multiple severe bugs: it didn't even show the blue lines when enabling the street view layer, split screen didn't show the marker for the virtual observer's location, and tapping in the map in split screen just rotated the view instead of moving the viewer to the new location. Something this broken shou…

I attended a webinar from a famous e-commerce platform. They mentioned that they no longer have QA and make use of CI/CD pipelines (edit: canary deployment, feature flags, etc.) to move fast and break things.

I assumed that everyone else no longer has QA and just pushes emergency fixes in a JIT fashion. I also assumed that our company is traditional and backwards for still having QA.

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

#29

Post by chrismorgan »

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?

The situation I’m responding to is the suggestion that you bundle your own browser rather than using one provided by Android System WebView or equivalent.

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

#30

Post by chrismorgan »

meibo wrote: post #27
throwaway53453 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, Firefox can act as a WebView implementation on any Android phone. Apps don't need to ship this.

No it can’t. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView: “GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.”

The purpose of WebView has certainly never been about using a different engine; rather, it’s to have only one copy of a browser for apps to use as a widget, rather than each app bundling its own browser which uses vast amounts of space and raises serious security concerns.

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