Crash while inflating ongoing-notification layout right after upgrade. Android 10 only

Issue

It started to happen out of the blue a couple of months ago. Android 10 only.

After the user upgrades to a new version of our app, a crash happens on launch.

The crash is only observed once for a given user. So we think the crash happens right after the upgrade to the new build. It is the new build that crashes (not the old one).

This is an example of a crash.

Fatal Exception: android.app.RemoteServiceException: Bad notification(tag=null, id=30) posted from package yo.app, 
crashing app(uid=10613, pid=16365): 
Couldn't inflate contentViewsandroid.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #19 in yo.app:layout/sky_eraser_main: 
Binary XML file line #19 in yo.app:layout/sky_eraser_main: Error inflating class androidx.appcompat.widget.Toolbar
       at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2052)
       at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:107)
       at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:214)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:7710)
       at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java)
       at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:516)
       at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:950)

The crashes look different from build to build. But the pattern is the same.

Let me transcribe what is happening in our opinion.

There is an ongoing notification (id=30) displaying the temperature (we are making a weather app). The notification is not able to post because of a crash while inflating its RemoteViews layout.

It seems that the original layout is substituted by another, completely unrelated layout (sky_eraser_main used in another place of our app). The wrong layout is different from build to build. It looks as though integer layout-ids are getting mixed up. Could it be the result of some weird R8 optimisation?

Unfortunately, we are not able to reproduce the crash locally.

Do you have an idea how to tackle these crashes?

The context

• Target SDK: 30
• Deployed as Android app bundle.
• minifyEnabled = true
• This is a kotlin multiplatform project.

Solution

From what you've been explaining looks like the resource references got updated as the app launches. This guy has the same problem

Essentially, the R class is an autogenerated class by the whole Android Studio build system that gets autogenerated whenever you add, remove and edit resource files. At the end of the day, each field of the "final" R classes (drawable, id, layout, etc.) hold an int value. And for some dark unknown reasons those references are getting updated at the time you first launch the app after an update on Android 10, (and very probably in Android 11 or some other vendor-dependant implementations of Android)

And as per the comment section in his answer (100+) votes doesn't seem to have a fix. I would try to try-catch the inflation of the layout and abort the notification if I manage to catch any exceptions.

Another approach would be to delay the launch of the notification using something like WorkManager to ensure that the references got updated by the time the NotifyWork kicks in

Answered By - Some random IT boy