Error inflating class android.webkit.WebView happens sporadically in production

Question

my application is on Google Play and it runs fine on most of devices (thousands of users). But in rare cases (fraction of percent of daily active users) I get Error in

Answer 1

If you see these reports from devices running Android Lollipop, please ignore them. This likely happens whenever something launches an activity that uses WebView while the WebView package is in the middle of being updated by Play Store (which can only happen on Lollipop currently). During updates, packages are treated as not installed by the package manager. That is, there is nothing wrong with your app. The time window while the updated package is considered non-existent is typically small, so when the app is relaunched after such a crash, it will start normally.