
Google Maps SDK is crashing - giffarage
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417
======
williamstein
Here's what the Whistle (dog tracking app that uses the Google Maps SDK) just
sent everybody via email:

> "Hi William, We have identified an issue stemming from an outage with Google
> Maps that is causing the Whistle app to immediately crash upon opening. Our
> team is aware of the issue and monitoring the situation closely. While there
> is no estimated time for resolution from Google, rest assured that the
> safety of Bella is still our top priority. Please keep Bella close for the
> time being. [...]"

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nikanj
Oh man this is going to be rough if it keeps the corrupted data in a local
cache. Cache probably won’t get refreshed before previous contents get parsed,
and parsing the data crashes the app.

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anaphor
Looks like you have to hit "Clear Storage" on Android in order to get it
working again (tested it with Uber). That is, not the cache, but the actual
application data. I.e. this will require users to wipe any data being locally
stored and log back in again. This is pretty bad.

Edit: Google has confirmed this is the case
[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment181](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment181)
but apparently the data will be invalidated within a few hours.

~~~
noitsnot
Yep. I tried clearing cache on Redfin but it does open after clearing app
data.

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mfkp
That explains why Doordash and UberEats were both crashing for me earlier
today. Was wondering what was going on, seemed like quite a coincidence.

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usmannk
Try opening Lyft on iOS, hard crash on boot. I don't wish to be someone
working on that right now!

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xref
Opened fine for me, maybe they fixed it in the 9m between our posts?

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fooey
seems to work fine when it's cached, but if you reload the app it'll start
crashing

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interestica
Aha. I just loaded up the Samsung Health app for the first time in forever and
it would crash everytime it tried to grab location for a tracked run. I tried
rolling back and and reinstalling and presumed it was an app bug. Ended up
uninstalling because there wasn't much info to investigate.

Reluctantly installed Strava and they mentioned an ongoing issue with Google
maps - but it seemed to display and record fine.

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Afforess
Ah, this is why my Doordash mobile client started crashing. I was wondering...

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gergles
Any chance we could get the link changed to something that doesn't have a
Google loginwall? I'm not going to sign in to a Google account to _read_ a bug
report.

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whalesalad
Reminder to think of your application as a system composed of many sub-
systems, where any sub-system can fail at any time. Plan for this, engineer
for this.

~~~
tersers
To an extent due diligence is required of any library, but there must always
be some guarantees for the benefit of the developer. It's unreasonable to
expect a developer to accommodate for the failure of any SDK call.

~~~
whalesalad
> It's unreasonable to expect a developer to accommodate for the failure of
> any SDK call.

This is not even remotely close to unreasonable. In fact, it is the opposite.
Doordash, Uber, Lyft etc. are completely dead on arrival due to a remote bug
that could have easily been protected against.

During SDK initialization, if shit hits the fan, pull the chute and inform the
user that things cannot proceed. Easy as pie. If you do not have that level of
control or the foresight/wisdom to implement, well yep you are going to be the
victim of a situation like this. And if you are the mobile lead at any of the
aforementioned companies I can guarantee your head is gonna be on a stick by
5pm.

~~~
jfim
Multiple comments are commenting that even with a try/catch, the error still
crashes the app.

From
[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment39](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment39)

> This happens even with a MapView.onCreate call for me, even when encased in
> a try / catch error. So beyond the fact that Google Maps isn't working, the
> Google Maps library isn't handling the error throwing properly and is
> bypassing the app's ability to catch errors.

From
[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment86](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/154855417#comment86)

> instead of crashing the app even though try/catch is used and this cryptic
> message cited above.

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saagarjha
I have heard that this applies to both iOS and Android, by the way.

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geoffbp
No-one is good anywhere, why is it crashing ;)

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fooey
seems to be fixed, but if you've had the crash you have to Clear Storage or
you'll keep crashing

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lnreddy
Uber and Lyft crash for me on Android.

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booi
i mean it's not the SDK that's crashing right, the service changed somehow.

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dliff
The SDK is crashing. It's likely crashing _because_ the service changed, but
it's causing actual crashes on iOS and Android devices which rely on the SDK.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
And even worse it doesn't crash in realtime. It crashes parsing locally cached
data caused by a bad update, meaning this possibly can't be quickly fixed
merely by fixing the API.

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x86_64Ubuntu
Imagine writing a test for that. Just to replicate it repeatedly. Would they
be able to use a phone emulator and point it to the old api to cache data, and
then go to the new api to replicate the failure?

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tmpz22
That actually doesn't sound that hard, it's very similar to writing e2e tests
over Selenium (except in this case instead of talking to chrome you're talking
to the android emulator).

