This afternoon, a number of Android users (myself included) suddenly saw notifications popping up on their devices that apps had stopped running. Many of the programs that throw errors can suddenly not open, and it contains important programs such as Gmail, some banking programs, Google Pay and others.
There are reports of the issue on DownDetector, Reddit and Twitter, and Google’s Workspace Cloud Status Dashboard confirms that they’re aware of issues with the Gmail app on Android. According to the status message, there will be an update on the issue by 20:05 ET.
If you are experiencing this issue, something that has worked for many people is to go to the Google Play Store on your device and uninstall the latest update of a system application called ‘Android System WebView’. This is the app that provides Chrome browser version within apps, and according to developers and end users, many of the bugs that people see indicate that the problem is there.
The removal of the updates calmed my phone and returned to normal. If we get official information from Google about the issue, I’ll update this message.