The release of Chrome 79 for Androidhas been halted by Google after several reports indicated that it deletes data from third-party apps. Apparently, there is a bug in the new Chrome 79 update that is causing problems for third-party apps that make extensive use of WebView. It is not yet certain how many of the apps are affected by this new bug, but Twitter is an app that uses Google's platform.
This bug appeared during the update from Chrome 78 to Chrome 79. During this process, Google changed the location of the Chrome directory.
The company released an announcement last week, in which it admitted that it made a mistake by not moving the contents of LocalStorage or WebSQL to the new Chrome 79 directory, which resulted in the data becoming inaccessible to all users.
LocalStorage and WebSQL
LocalStorage and WebSQL are storage mechanisms through which a website or web application stores data on the device (in the Chrome directory profile).
While some websites use LocalStorage or WebSQL, the majority prefer to use database servers to store user data. However, both LocalStorage and WebSQL are popular on mobile devices and are heavily used by mobile app developers.
Today, many Android apps run on a website that is placed inside a WebView component. These apps rely heavily on LocalStorage or WebSQL to store user settings and data locally, rather than storing them on a server.
The bug in Chrome 79 resulted in these apps losing access to all files and data stored inside the old LocalStorage and WebSQL folders in Chrome 78. Now, some users have lost data, settings, files, and even the ability to access their accounts.
A patch is being prepared for release soon
Google developers are currently working on an update to fix the data transfer process, but it may already be too late for many users.
Unfortunately, the update has already reached about 50% of the Android userbase, which means a lot of damage.
It is not yet certain whether the data in LocalStorage and WebSQL has been completely lost. However, there are some cleaning applications that may have deleted it.
For now, users are advised not to install Chrome 79. However, if you have already installed it, you can only wait for the patch to resolve this issue.
