Last Friday, a CrowdStrike update messed things up, causing blue screens on business computers that included its Windows security system. As a result, a multitude of services were down, including airport networks, banks, hospitals, and more. The issue didn’t affect Android, though Three years ago we experienced similar chaos on our Android phones.
These were not blue screens but basic applications like Gmail, Facebook, Google and many others. They closed without noticewhich makes it almost impossible to use the mobile phone. It was not the fault of a CrowdStrike update then, but rather the fault of the system’s WebView and the hand of Google itself.
Android’s “CrowdStrike”
Where were you on March 24, 2021? If you had an Android phone back then, chances are you experienced a bit of chaos during which many apps didn’t workshowing errors or simply closing as soon as you opened them.
Android is by no means free of errors. Without going any further, Google had to stop Android 15 OTA updates because they ended up corrupting the system, although that is something to be expected when testing a beta version of the operating system. This was much different the WebView bug of 2021which affected millions of Android users regardless of the brand of their mobile phone and the version of Android and without eating or drinking it: overnight, several applications closed as soon as they were opened.
The blood did not reach the river as in last Friday’s CrowdStrike error, since it affected end users and not servers used in global infrastructures, but It is easy to draw a parallel between the two cases.– An update is shipped en masse and ends up causing problems indiscriminately.
The WebView error in the Google system prevented you from using applications such as Gmail, Google or Facebook because they closed by themselves as soon as you opened them
The cause of all this chaos turned out to be a component of the Android systemSystem Webview, which is available for developers who want to use its functionality to open web pages in their applications, simply and without having to implement all the logic of a browser in their application. In turn, a WebView error can become an error in your application.
That’s exactly what happened on March 24, 2021, when a WebView system update caused all apps that use WebView will stop workingand they are not uncommon. If the app opens web links itself, with Chrome’s custom tabs, and not directly in the browser, it is very likely that it used WebView.
The solution was simple in this case: uninstall system web view updates until Google released a new version that fixed the issue, which didn’t take long to happen. Those whose mobile phones were set to receive automatic updates (and who were therefore receiving the broken WebView) would also receive the fixed version, so technically the problem should have been fixed without user intervention, just by waiting.
The temporary solution, before Google updated System WebView, was to uninstall Android System WebView updates.
This wasn’t the first time a Google app update left Android phones in complete chaos either: in 2019, Gboard update caused keyboard to crash non-stopforcing you to install another keyboard app to solve this problem. And it’s quite difficult when you don’t have a keyboard on your mobile.
The failure of the system’s WebView contributed to Google will improve its processes to prevent this from happening again. The company then promised to better audit WebView dependencies, implement a safe mode for WebView, and improve the experimentation and update processes. It’s true that the case has not yet been repeated, and it would have been nice if CrowdStrike had been careful not to repeat the same mistakes made by Google.
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