In the last few hours, several users took to the internet to complain about Android apps crashing out of the blue. XDA Developers stumbled upon several complaints on forums such as Twitter and Reddit, where users talked about Gmail, Amazon Shopping, and a host of other apps crashing. Initially, it was speculated that there was an outage of some sorts, but that notion got debunked when the desktop versions of the said apps were found to be running fine. Even their iOS versions were working fine, so the problem was something within Android. It didn’t take the internet too long to figure out that the problem lied within Android WebView.
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It turned out that a recent Android System WebView update made it unstable, causing all apps associated with it to crash. Android WebView is a utility that developers can use to display webpages inside the app, without having to open a new browser window. Just about every Android app uses WebView in some capacity.
How to fix the random Android app crashes
However, Google has rolled out a fix for the issue. You can download the updated version of Android System WebView and Google Chrome from the Google Play Store now to fix the random app crashes right away.
To be clear, while the problem appeared to be quite widespread, not all Android users seemed to be affected by it. Hopefully the problem will not crop up again with future updates.
