Crashes and How We Handle Them

Elevated Crash Rate on Google Pixel Devices

For the past few months, we have noticed an elevated crash rate and higher incidence of ANR (Application Not Responding) reports on Google Pixel devices. These issues are seen only on Google Tensor chips designed by Google, and not on any other SoCs.

We’ve filed multiple bugs with Google. We are waiting for them to respond/fix. You can help get these issues more attention from Google by starring & up-voting each of these bugs.

crbug.com/1378496

According to Google, “Top #1st browser crash on latest webview stable #114.0.5735.130.
26790 crashes from 25914 clients.
It’s a top#1 webview crash seen on latest beta on android.
Its a new crash introduced in M110 and regressed as below.”

bug:262071604

According to Google, “We have shared this with our product and engineering team and will update this issue with more information as it becomes available.”

bug:255397162

25 comments, 47 people have starred/+1’d it, but no action yet from Google.

All these issues are caused by bugs in WebView or in core Android libraries, not in our app code. Since the root cause is in code authored by and maintained by Google, there’s nothing we can do proactively except to wait for Google to fix them.

Please accept our sincere apologies, we are looking forward to seeing this issue fixed as eagerly as you all are.

Why do Apps sometimes Crash?

An app is a complex piece of software that depends on many other complex pieces of software to work correctly. Even if one of these has a subtle programming error, the entire app will crash.

In our apps, we strive to reduce our crash rate to effectively zero, but this is virtually impossible, so we try to make it as low as possible.

• Device Diversity: With tens and thousands of random Android phones all over the world, each running a custom unverified build of Android, code that works well on 99.9% of devices will unexpectedly crash on 1 or 2 devices (usually from the same manufacturer).

• Dependencies: Android apps depend on other software such as Google Play Services, which crashes way more than the core app code. Since we did not write that code, we have no ability to fix it, even if we wanted to.

• Rendering Library: For displaying Web pages, our apps uses the Android WebView component from Google. This component also crashes way more than the rest of the app code. Again, we cannot fix this.

• Device Constraints: Other apps running at the same time on the phone may cause resource competition, which leaves our app no option but to quit unexpectedly.

Despite all these, we try our very best to make our apps crash as little as possible.

How we Reduce Crashes

We do several things to detect and fix crashes.

• Detection: Google Play & Analytics provide us crash logs whenever the app crashes on your phone. We appreciate you taking the time to report these. Note that these crash reports don’t include your email address, so if you want us to reply to you, please type in your email address manually in the Text Description field when sending a bug report.

• Analysis: We regularly look at these crash reports, especially to see if there are repeated patterns.

• Fixes: If we find that a particular bug was caused by our app code, those are the easiest ones: you will typically see the fix in the immediate next version.

• Mitigation: If the crash involved another component, then we try everything possible to mitigate the impact of the crash. This includes detecting invalid conditions and writing code defensively to guard against them.

– ¯\_(ツ)_/¯: For some crashes in Google libraries and tools, we really have no option but to shrug and say sorry! All we can say is, please keep reporting these issues, and we hope Google will address them in the next update.