A strange stability bug that results in a complete UI freeze has affected several Android phones over the past few days. The issue is mainly evident in Google’s Pixel lineup and some OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Samsung phones.
As reported first by Android Police, some apps randomly freeze and render the entire user interface unusable. The issue is prevalent on Android 10 while Android 11 developer preview is also reported to suffer from this.
While this doesn’t really seem to be caused by a certain application, users say Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, YouTube Music apps are usually involved. Seeing Amazon app face weird issues doesn’t really come as a surprise considering its overall poor UI/UX, but other modern apps seem to be affected as well.
Another thing that really bothers me on the Pixel 4 XL – when an app freezes up, it oftentimes locks up the whole UI. Notifications, home gesture – everything becomes unresponsive.
Sometimes the UI unfreezes when the app does, sometimes the app remains frozen.
Anyone else?
— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) April 17, 2020
If you’re facing the aforesaid issue, you may try locking and unlocking your phone as a temporary workaround. Also, for devices with a physical fingerprint scanner and swipe gestures (Pixels and phones running custom ROMs), users say swipe down gesture to pull down the notification shade rescues the phone.
Meanwhile, there exists another issue on OnePlus devices that result in frozen UI, which is likely because Google seems to have messed up Webview in the recent updates. Personally, I’ve encountered both of these issues over the past few days on my OnePlus 7T running Android 10. Strangely enough, my colleague with the same phone and Android version claims to have never faced the issue so far.
The company has not officially addressed or acknowledged the issue just yet but we could expect the software giant to treat this issue with priority since a significant number of users appear to have been affected by this.
So, are you facing UI freeze issues on your phone? If yes, let us know your phone’s model in the comments below.
