Google Chrome 79 Update Stopped on Android Devices: Know Why

It looks like the Android users have to wait for more for the roll-out of Google's latest Chrome v79 browser update. Google took this step after a critical bug wiped data in select applications that use Android's WebView feature.

As AndroidPolice explains, WebView is responsible for rendering web pages inside applications. Many third-party applications use this feature to open a page. Google Chrome loads the content in such cases. Some apps that use WebView functionality are Twitter Lite and PhoneGap.

Google explains, "Android WebView is a system component powered by Chrome that allows Android apps to display web content. This component is pre-installed on your device and should be kept up to date to ensure you have the latest security updates and other bug fixes."

When it comes to Chrome 79 update, Google moved the location where data storage is stored. As per a post on Chromium bug page, the update didn't transfer the storage properly, leading to the bug affecting many applications.

Soon after the update, users and developers took it to Google's dev forum to share the problem. One user wrote on Chromium bug page, "This is a catastrophe, our users' data are being deleted as they receive the update."

Another user wrote, "Same here. This is a significant issue. We can see the old data is left in the filesystem, but it's not "found" by Chome 79 - which I consider even worse - for one, it breaks the apps as it's not available, but also because it keeps old data silently persistent... with no way for the app to update or clear it without recurring to native access. Any idea for a fix? (it looks it add "Default" to the path; i.e. it becomes "/Default/Local Storage."

Google said it would quickly roll out a fix however paused the Chrome 79 update. Here's what Google said:

"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."