Android ViewGroup crash: Attempt to read from field 'int android.view.View.mViewFlags' on a null object reference

Question

We have found several cases for this kind of crashes reported by backend logging monitoring. It seems the crashes do not tie to particular UX failure. And from the reports,

Answer 1

While it is ugly and not good practice, the only thing I could get to reliably work is just catching the exception in dispatchDraw() like below:

override fun dispatchDraw(canvas: Canvas?) {
        /*
         * We're doing this because of the below exception that is out of our control:
         * java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to read from field
         * 'int android.view.View.mViewFlags' on a null object reference at
         * android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchDraw(ViewGroup.java:4111)
         */
        try {
            super.dispatchDraw(canvas)
        } catch (e: NullPointerException) {

        }
    }

Just make sure your desired behavior is working correctly and you're not breaking something else by doing this. Again, not ideal, but it's the only thing I could get to work and I'm absolutely sure in my case it's not breaking anything else.

Peace to you :)