Google has stopped rollout of latest Chrome browser for millions of users, here’s why

Google’s one of the most used apps, Chrome, recently started receiving an update for all the Android users. The company started rolling out Chrome 79 for Android but soon had to pause the roll out because of several reports of the new version ‘wiping’ data from third-party apps that used Chrome’s built-in WebView framework. For those unfamiliar with Chrome’s WebView, it is a framework that is responsible to load web pages when they are opened inside an app. So, for instance when you click on a link inside an app and are navigated to a log-in page to move forward, that log-in page which opens inside the app, Chrome’s WebView is responsible for it.
As explained in Chromium posts and by Android Police, one of the changes that was included in Chrome version 79 for Android was that the location where the web data is stored was updated. But according to the Chromium bug page, the data from localStorage and WebSQL – two types of storage used by web apps and packaged apps — wasn’t migrated properly and hence the data was inaccessible.