Why does Android app lose WebView data after upgrade to Android 10?

Question

We have at least two Android applications that use the webview component with persistent offline data in the form of IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and Cookies. They appear to lose all of this data with the upgrade from Android 9 to Android 10 on Pixel XL (and at least one other device). This has not happened with these apps on other device upgrades over the last 5 years on any device that we know of.

This has the potential of data loss if users do push WebView data changes to the server before performing the upgrade.

We're trying to figure out if this is:

• A bug in the upgrade process?
• Intentionally done for some reason (and is it documented)?
• Some change we are expected to include in the app to survive the Android 10 upgrade without this data loss?

Other Notes:

• We confirmed that if we reload the data it operates normally but, as mentioned, users can still lose data with the upgrade
• We tried restarting the device again
• We created a debug version to inspect and the data

Answer 1

There were some changes in a way that WebView works. It is no longer provided by Google Chrome, WebView is now a separate app. Reason behind this is EU restrictions.

You can find more information here.