Matti Robinson
16 Dec 2019 10:36
Google begun shipping the latest Chrome 79 update around a week ago for both mobile and desktop users. The new update included improvements over things like notification about data breaches you might be affected by.
However, not everything went according to plan. While the update was meant to help protect users from data loss, the update itself has been losing users data.
Although the data in this case hasn't been acquired by any third parties, and there might be still a way out of this mess, Google has decided to pull the update.
The problem seems to affect Chrome's Android users and their data collected by other apps using Chrome's WebView feature.
Many apps use Chrome's simple WebView component to show content on the web for the app users. In Chrome 79 the WebView feature changed significantly.
The update was meant to transcode the old data to the new format. However, this process was buggy and the transfer hasn't been functioning as intended.
The data isn't lost entirely, though, and it is possible, maybe even likely, that Google engineers figure out the correct way to convert the lost data to the new format in a way that the user can still access it.
For now the update has been paused until the fix is in place.