The rollout of Chrome 79 has now resumed, as confirmed by Google’s Chrome Releases blog. Chrome 79 (79.0.3945.93) for Android features a fix for the WebView bug. The fix is explained as, “Resolves a problem in WebView where some users’ app data was not visible within those apps. The app data was not misplaced and can be made visible in apps with this update.”
As Android Police reports, the bug impacts apps that depend on Android’s WebView, which authorizes web content to be accessed and displayed from inside an app. To ensure this to work, some data is saved locally; however, with Chrome 79, the location of the storage was modified. This required local data to be migrated to the brand new location, and that is where the failure lies.
The data migration did not happen correctly, so apps are left unable to operate correctly. The excellent news is the data is not being deleted because it nonetheless exists within the old location. Google now wants to figure out the best way to move it and to take action shortly; however, till a fix is in place, the rollout of Chrome 79 has been paused.
On the Chromium bugs forum, it is unclear what Google will do, and engineers are at present considering whether to proceed with the migration, whereas shifting any information missed to the new location, or reverting the change and transferring any migrated files again to the old location.