So in trying to open Gmail this morning to find out who left Kudos for me on AO3, I found out that the recent Google app update that came available to my phone on 9/3/21 and automatically went through last night basically broke half the Google-related apps on my phone. If I can even get as far as my Gmail managing to fully load, I maybe get a half-second to glance at my inbox list and unopened emails before it crashes. Great.
Granted, it *could* be worse. I can still get into Gmail via browser with more hoops to jump through (pain in the rear method), I don’t really need my GPS right now, I don’t use the main Google app all that much, and I can still use most of the other things I use uninhibited, aside from the random popup saying “Google Keeps Stopping”/”Maps Keeps Stopping”/”Gmail Keeps Stopping”. After restarting my phone, force-stopping apps, uninstalling and reinstalling, and doing every free virus scan available, I went researching and found out that ironically, this update was supposed to fix this problem that’s been happening since July or so for some people (I’ve never had it until today), and found out by Play Store reviews that I’m not alone -seems for fixing it for some people, it broke it for everyone who didn’t have the problem. And unfortunately, while reverting to an older version does fix my maps, it crashes before an older version of Google ever loads, and it goes back to an ancient version of Gmail from 2018 that isn’t even compatible. At least from those reviews, I know that doing a factory reset on my phone won’t make the problem go away (which I’m kind of grateful for, because I *really* didn’t want to have to do that, and I was considering it as the one thing I hadn’t done... at the same time, it’s still broken indefinitely!)
