This week saw Android phone apps crashing for many users, with issues affecting apps such as Gmail, Facebook, Amazon and banking apps. Users were seeing notifications on their devices saying that their apps had stopped running or could not be opened.
Reports of issues began on Monday, while social media was filled with reports of apps crashing, and outage-report website DownDetector showed a surge in problems for Gmail and Amazon.
As it turns out, Android System WebView, which is preinstalled on all Android devices and allows Android apps to display web content, received an update that sent things awry.
Google told users to update their Android System WebView and Google’s Chrome browser.
A spokesperson for Google stated: “We have resolved the issue with WebView that caused some apps on Android to crash for some users. Updating Android System WebView and Google Chrome via Google Play should now resolve the issue.”
