I’m been spending a whole weekend trying to hunt down a crash reported by one of my user who is running Samsung J3 on Android Oreo 8.1. The app launch then crash. It also bring down the whole Android OS and rebooted the phone. This is very unusual and because app crash normally won’t bring down the whole OS.

No crash report recorded on App Center (crash analytical tool I used) or Google Play Console which is understandable because whole OS is down). This make the debugging almost impossible since I cannot duplicate this on my phone nor emulator I tried. Since only 1 user reported, I suspect this is very much a isolated case.

After some deep search on the internet. It seem like Samsung Android phone have this cache partition that help app launch faster by caching some data in it. Some time it will become corrupted and causing random problem. Since wiping the cache partition doesn’t wipe any of the user data, I tell my user to give it a try. It work!

Here are the post on how to wipe the cache partition: https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Phones/How-to-wipe-the-Cache-Partition-on-your-phone-or-tablet/td-p/12662