Chrome on Android has been a bit more crash-happy over the past few months. There were reports of WebView (the Chrome-based engine that powers web content inside apps) having problems last year, and Google has acknowledged Chrome 83 crashes on select Asus devices. OnePlus phone owners have also had to deal with buggy Chrome behavior, as the app has been freezing and crashing on some OnePlus devices for the past several months.

It's not out of the ordinary for Chrome to occasionally become unresponsive — the culprit is usually resource-intensive websites, rather than the browser itself. However, there has been an overwhelming number of reports in the past few months of Chrome and WebView having problems on OnePlus phones. The earliest complaints date back to October, but the frequency of reports has increased in the past two months.

Artem Russakovskii, the owner of this fine website, also received a few confirmations in April after asking if anyone was still experiencing WebView crashing on OnePlus phones.

Unfortunately, it's still unclear what exactly the root cause of these crashes is. We reached out to Google and OnePlus for comment, but neither company has provided answers yet — OnePlus is still looking into the issue, and Google never responded to our inquiry. The only report filed in the Chromium bug tracker related to OnePlus crashes appears to be limited to Trusted Web Activities. We have also discovered a handful of reports about similar crashing/freezing issues on other devices, but they don't appear to be anywhere as frequent as complaints from OnePlus owners.

Hopefully, OnePlus or Google will eventually provide an answer or a fix for these issues. Even for folks using a different web browser, issues with WebViews can still cause countless third-party applications to experience problems.