Android now has a smart solution for crashing apps

There’s not much you can do about a crashing app on Android devices bar sending feedback to the developer. Fortunately, Google has announced a new feature that might come in handy.

The company took to its Android developer blog (h/t: r/Android) to announce automatic update prompts for crashing apps. So what does that mean?

These prompts will appear when an app crashes in the foreground and a more stable update is available to download from the Play Store. The prompt will thus let you quickly update the app. You can view a screenshot of the alert below.

Google notes that developers don’t have to do anything to enable this feature. Instead, the prompts are automatically enabled when the Play Store has a newer version of an offending app with a “statistically relevant, lower crash rate.”

Best of all, you don’t need to be running a recent version of Android to take advantage of update prompts. Google says the feature works on phones and tablets running Android 7.0 or later. That means even your aging phone from 2017 should support the feature.

This obviously won’t be of much use if your newly updated app is crashing, but it’s still a handy feature if you’re like me and don’t automatically update your apps.