We know that there are a lot of Google services in the market and most of them are popular. However, there are some services which stand out of the rest and one of them is Google Chrome. Google’s Chrome browser is one of the best browsers on the internet used for smartphones and PCs too. As we know, Google Chrome comes as default on Android devices since Google develops the Android operating system. This means that billions of Android users use Google’s Chrome browser and the company provides timely updates to its app too.

In one such incident, Google has had to stop rolling out its latest update for Google Chrome on Android due to a bug. We have reports from AndroidPolice that a bug was reported in Google’s Chrome 79 update which would wipe user data from some apps on Android. This meant that Google had to pause the rollout and look into what was causing this issue. Interestingly, Google Chrome 79 update for Android did not wipe user data from the browser. Instead, the app was wiping data from other apps installed on the device which left everyone puzzled.

Looking into this further, app developers found that apps which were using Android’s built-in WebView were affected by this bug. WebView is the framework which lets you view the web inside the app. This means that any app which opens a webpage inside itself is using the WebView framework to do so. As for Google’s statement on this bug, the company revealed that:

We are currently discussing the correct strategy for resolving this issue which will be one of:

a) continue the migration, moving the missed files into their new locations.
b) revert the change by moving migrated files to their old locations.

We will let you know which of these two options have been chosen soon. In the meantime it would be good to collect a list of affected packages, and details of whether any mitigations have been released to users, and in what versions so that we can test that the respin doesn’t interact badly with the mitigation.