The Google app has long had the ability to bring up personal and on-device results alongside online ones. It seems that a recent update has broken this feature, thus causing it to crash on a number of Android devices.
Save for a Podcasts dark theme, the latest beta version (10.89.9) of the Google app seems like a pretty routine update. However, Redditor u/jayeshdb spotted a bug when searching message-related queries that causes the Google app to crash.
We were able to replicate the issue on some of our devices, but not all. It seems that the pattern of devices affected is inconsistent, but still widespread judging by the number of users reporting the same problem in the comments.
The issue seems rooted in a UI change brought by the release that fails to render properly, according to logs we captured. It persists across any search phrase that’s related to fetching messages, such as “what are my messages” or simply, “my messages.” It’s important to note that this does not affect the Google Assistant, which is still able to read messages properly.
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- The Google app crashing after searching for “my messages.”
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- The message search functionality when no new messages are present.
The intended behavior of this feature is to allow the user to bring up new, unread messages from their messaging apps. If there are no new messages, it will show “Sorry, I can’t find any,” and offer search results from the web.
There currently isn’t a known workaround for the crash, so we hope a patch is sent out soon. For now, you can still use the Assistant to achieve the same goal by asking, “what are my messages?” This command supports most first- and third-party messaging apps. If you really need, you can also downgrade the app by resetting it to the factory version in your phone’s Settings app, and then downloading the latest stable version from APKMirror.
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