Code 'n Stuff

A word of caution; last night I enabled the new “Encrypt all synced data” option in Google Chrome. It is awesome that we now offer this.

The Android browser also talks to the chrome sync servers; their (not Chrome) browser in Honeycomb 3.1 looks like it doesn’t handle encryption yet, and crashes hard when the option is enabled on my G-Slate. Periodically, the com.google.process.gapps process crashes, often while I’m doing something else on my tablet. Looking at the output of adb logcat:

E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): FATAL EXCEPTION: SyncAdapterThread-1
E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): java.lang.NullPointerException
E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): 	at com.google.android.syncadapters.
    bookmarks.BookmarksSyncAdapter.innerPerformSync(
    BookmarksSyncAdapter.java:562)
E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): 	at com.google.android.syncadapters.
    bookmarks.BookmarksSyncAdapter.onPerformLoggedSync(
    BookmarksSyncAdapter.java:246)
E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): 	at com.google.android.common.
    LoggingThreadedSyncAdapter.onPerformSync(
    LoggingThreadedSyncAdapter.java:33)
E/AndroidRuntime( 2861): 	at android.content.
    AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter$SyncThread.run(
    AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter.java:202)

So…don’t turn on encryption on all your browser sync data in Chrome if you have a Honeycomb tablet! Since you can’t disable this once it’s on in Chrome, the workaround is unchecking Accounts & sync > (your Google account) > Sync Browser until their browser supports encrypted datatypes.

(In general, if you’re wondering why something is crashing, you can usually get a good idea by using adb logcat from the Android development SDK or one of the logcat programs on Market.)