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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 18 2019, @12:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps:

A change to the location of profile data in Chrome 79 on Android, the new version rolling out now, means that applications using the WebView component lose data stored locally.

"This is a catastrophe; our users' data are being deleted as they receive the update," complained one developer.

[...] Google said it has halted the rollout, which is estimated at 50 per cent of devices.

The problem appears to stem from a change to the location of profile data in Chromium, the open source project on which Google Chrome is based. Some applications, such as those built with Apache Cordova, use the WebView component extensively, and in these cases the location of local data is determined by this component.

The upgrade to Chrome 79 should migrate this data to the new location, but a Chromium engineer remarked that "unfortunately local storage was missed off the list of files migrated."

[...] It gets worse. "There are several more missed migrations. 'databases' contains the websql dbs 'QuotaManager', and 'QuotaManager-journal' tracks site storage quotas," said another engineer.

One would think that after the deleting of user's files by a Microsoft Windows auto-update raised such a backlash, that testing for loss of data would be a top priority.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:25PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:25PM (#933719)

    RTFA.

    It's locally stored data that is now being stored elsewhere on android devices -- without migrating existing date or notifying the thousands of third-party developers who use Webview

    Which makes the fuck up even *more* idiotic.

    But hey. What do you want for nothing? Your money back?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:44PM (#933722)

    You don't control the application. You don't control the updates. You don't control what it does with your data. You only THINK you do. And updates like this show you just how precarious of a position that is to be in.

    Helps people better understand why before the cloud so many people kept using the same applications for years or decades without feeling the need to upgrade. There is a certain security in it compared to a random slew of new bugs, changes, and omissions in later revisions of a software application or platform.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 18 2019, @04:15PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday December 18 2019, @04:15PM (#933760) Journal

    Since you pay with your data, you should demand your data back.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.