This afternoon, a number of Android users (self included) suddenly saw notifications pop up on their devices saying that apps had stopped running. Many of the apps throwing errors suddenly can’t be opened, and they include important ones like Gmail, a number of banking apps, Google Pay and others.
There are reports of the problem on DownDetector, Reddit and Twitter, and Google’s Workspace Cloud Status Dashboard confirms they’re aware of problems with the Gmail app on Android. According to the status message, there will be an update on the issue by 8:05 PM ET.
If you’re having this problem, something that’s worked for many people is to go into the Google Play Store on your device and uninstall the latest update to a system app called “Android System WebView.” It’s the app that provides Chrome-like browser rendering within apps, and according to developers and end users, many of the errors people are seeing indicate the problem resides there.
Uninstalling the updates got my phone to calm down and go back to normal, if we get any official information from Google about the problem I will update this post.
