A month ago, half the world went crazy because of a small Android tool that caused dozens of apps to stop working on our phones, regardless of whether they were from Samsung, Xiaomi, realme or Motorola. This tool is WebView, the one in charge of allowing hundreds of applications to surf the Net without resorting to third-party browsers.
In a statement released this week by the Google team, it has been determined that the problem dates back to “Chrome and WebView’s configuration and experimentation technology,” affecting the ability of applications to correctly display web content.
The solution required the distribution of updated binaries for Chrome and WebView; These new releases were made available for distribution via Google Play for automatic and manual updates. A new WebView update became available one day after the issues were reported.
The solution so that it does not happen again
Although the problem was quickly solved, Google wants to make sure that it does not happen again and that chaos like the one we experienced on March 23rd is generated on the Internet. Therefore, he promised to implement measures to mitigate future errors in applications related to WebView.
These new features include improving deployment policies, “speeding up” WebView and Chrome updates on the Play Store, and implementing a “safe mode” for WebView. The latter is the key to avoiding failures and unexpected shutdowns as it will automatically allow the tool to return to a previously known operating state if a problem arises. This Safe Mode of WebView would return the program to the previous stable version just like we can do it with any other software when the latest version has been launched with some kind of error.
This is the “official” solution proposed by the Android development team. Specifically, it has been prepared by the Google Workspace team and although this safe mode and the rest of the solutions have not yet been implemented in WebView, these news are intended to address the problem, as well as to improve the system.
Of course, the fact that there are several apps that close on their own can depend on many factors, such as the app itself or incompatibilities with the operating system. this measure by Google is only going to eliminate these failures as long as, as happened last month, they are related to WebView .
Source> Android Authority
