Unity game started crashing on android 8

Question

Got following stacktrace from Android Vitals:

java.lang.Error: FATAL EXCEPTION [main]
Unity version     : 5.6.2f1
Device model      : samsung SM-G955F
Device fin         


        

Answer 1

We were seeing the same error out of a large portion of our player base. We were able to contact Unity and get some insight into the error.

From Unity Enterprise Support:

We are aware of the issue. We fixed it in 2017.3 after upgrading the JNIbridge to support Oreo APIs. Previous reports describe that when a Unity application that has INTERNET permission is running, and the Google play services is updated, stopped or reboot, it will cause the app to crash in Android 8, 8.1 devices.

The problem is that ServiceConnection.onBindingDied which was added in API level 26 is not implemented before 2017.3; we added this for GoogleAdsServiceConnection in such version an also updated the JNIbridge to solve the problem.

I'm able to reproduce it in an empty project by setting Internet Access to "Require" and when running on the device, go to settings ->Apps & notifications->google play services->storage->MANAGE SPACE->CLEAR ALL DATA, then the app crashes as described in Stack Overflow.

Do you have plans to upgrade your project to 2017.4 LTS?

I'm asking because we think that a backport of the fix is not feasible, not only because it would be for a version for which we no longer create patches (5.6.x) but an appropriate fix would involve backporting the full support for Oreo APIs which might be tricky and may cause regressions.

We have decided to try and upgrade our Unity Version from 5.6.4f1 into the recommended 2017 versions. Sounds like it should resolve our issues.