Chrome for Android appears to have severe freezing issues on OnePlus devices

Damien Wilde | May 27 2020 - 5:10 am PT

If you have a OnePlus smartphone, are you experiencing issues with Google Chrome crashing or freezing? According to reports, the mobile browser is having some severe issues on OnePlus hardware.

Reports suggest that WebView — which essentially powers any web content within Android apps — is causing serious bugs in Chrome, and any in-app browser windows on OnePlus smartphones (via Android Police).

Chrome isn’t always the most stable browser, which isn’t always the fault of the app itself. Many webpages can start hogging system resources, resulting in slow response times and even lockups of the browser. Reports have been growing steadily, but this appears to have been an issue for a couple of months already.

Some people are simply seeing Google Chrome lockup and freeze on their device. It’s not even limited to one OnePlus series device, even the recently released OnePlus 8 seems to be affected. Although not always the case, when media is embedded within a webpage, the longest freezes seem to occur.

There is no actual fix for the problems, and while it looks like OnePlus may be looking into the issue, it might rumble on for a little while until the root cause is found. As the team at Android Police notes, there has only been one report related to the issue posted on the Chromium bug tracker — but that appears to be related to the Trusted Web Activities.

We’ve reached out to Google and OnePlus for comment on the Chrome problems, and will update should we hear back from either firm.

At least until a resolution is found, it might be worthwhile switching out to a third-party browser like Firefox. If you are having issues, let us know down in the comments section below. How are you mitigating Chrome crashing on your OnePlus device?