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This week’s top stories: Android WebView crashes, Google WifiNanScan app, OnePlus 8 Pro vs 9 Pro

Kyle Bradshaw | Mar 27 2021 - 8:09 am PT

Google Chrome for Android in the Play Store

In this week’s top stories: Chrome and WebView cause many Android apps to crash, Google launches WifiNanScan for developers to experiment, we settle whether the OnePlus 9 Pro is worth upgrading to from the OnePlus 8 Pro, and more.

On Monday of this week, many Android apps, including Gmail and TikTok, were crashing frequently due to an issue with “WebView,” the in-app browser. The temporary fix for this issue was to uninstall the updates for the affected app, but Google later released a new update via the Play Store that permanently fixed the problem.

Google has since confirmed that the unexpected app crashes were the result of a bad update to the WebView system component, which was pulled yesterday evening and replaced by the new versions mentioned above.

This week, Google released a new Android app called “WifiNanScan App,” which is meant for developers and phone creators to test out a new technology called “Wi-Fi Aware.” With two phones running the app, you can determine how far apart the two devices are from each other using only Wi-Fi signals.

With this app it is possible to obtain a distance measurement with a precision of about 1 meter with phones up to 15 meters apart. Developers, OEMs and researchers can use this tool to validate distance/range measurements enabling the development of peer-to-peer ranging and data transfer, find my phone and context-aware applications based on the WiFi Aware/NAN API.

The OnePlus 9 series devices were announced this week, and expectedly OnePlus fans are already eyeing the phones for their next upgrade. Our Damien Wilde took time this week to give his thoughts on whether the OnePlus 9 Pro is a worthy upgrade from the OnePlus 8 Pro.

While Google offers their own home camera security system through the Nest line, there’s plenty of room for competition in the space. This week, our Ben Schoon took a look at home security cameras from TP-Link Kasa, which also integrate smoothly with the Google Assistant.

You can easily pair TP-Link Kasa cameras to Google Assistant via the Home app, just like you’d like most light bulbs, smart plugs, and other products that show up within the app. Unfortunately, Kasa cams won’t appear in the Google Home app with their streams, as only Nest cameras currently do that, but the integration goes beyond just asking Google to show you a feed.

Lastly, our APK Insight team discovered a massive feature in-progress in the Google Search app for Android. Entitled “Memory,” the feature allows you to save pages, images, reminders, and more to a personalized Google Assistant-powered database of sorts. We were even able to get hands-on with an early version of the feature, demonstrating how it would work.

Afterwards, everything is viewable in a new “Memory” feed that lives alongside Snapshot. Organized reverse chronologically, Google will show “Older Memories” and those from “Today” as card entries. There are special cards when you save Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawing, Forms, Sites, Jamboard, and other uploaded Drive files that provide a document preview.