NPE on com.android.server.autofill.RemoteFillService$PendingRequest.cancel()

Question

Crashlytics is reporting NullPointerException related to Auto Fill as shown below:

Fatal Exception: java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to invoke virtual method
'boolean com.android.server.autofill.RemoteFillService$PendingRequest.cancel()' on a null object reference
  at android.os.Parcel.readException(Parcel.java:1965)
  at android.os.Parcel.readException(Parcel.java:1905)
  at android.app.IActivityManager$Stub$Proxy.reportAssistContextExtras(IActivityManager.java:8297)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleRequestAssistContextExtras(ActivityThread.java:3210)
  at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1913)
  at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:105)
  at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:164)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6944)
  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java)
  at com.android.internal.os.Zygote$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(Zygote.java:327)
  at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:1374)

Caused by android.os.RemoteException: Remote stack trace:
  at com.android.server.autofill.RemoteFillService.cancelCurrentRequest(RemoteFillService.java:177)
  at com.android.server.autofill.Session.cancelCurrentRequestLocked(Session.java:465)
  at com.android.server.autofill.Session.access$1000(Session.java:118)
  at com.android.server.autofill.Session$1.onHandleAssistData(Session.java:322)
  at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.reportAssistContextExtras(ActivityManagerService.java:14713)

However, the stack does not include anything from my app yet crash is happening on my side.

Axum

Possible duplicate of What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it? – Gayn

@Gayn , This is not just null pointer exception. It is located at com.android.server.autofill.RemoteFillService$PendingRequest.cancel(). I don't know how to solve it because this is not coming in my code – Axum

Any solution for this issue. Seems to be new one. – Coopery

Have you managed to find out what causes this? – Savannahsavant

Same problem and no idea why this is happens ? – Tonguing

@SanjayKumar Did you get any lead? I got the same. – Overvalue

@Rakesh, I did't find any solution. – Axum

@SanjayKumar I've raised it to Google. Let's see. – Overvalue

FWIW, I am getting this error from users with Xiaomi Mi A1 device running Android 9 (Pie). – Exemplum

Answer 1

This is not an issue with your app but with specific Android OEMs. Seems to be happening more frequently on Samsung Devices and not seen on Pixel Devices. Here is an issue report to Google which is closed as 'Won't Fix'. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/123311621

Since the crash is happening because of autofill. I would recommend disabling autofill for the specific view by setting importanForAutofill as false/no. https://developer.android.com/reference/android/R.attr.html#importantForAutofill

Jeavons

Can you back your claim that setting importanForAutofill to no will avoid this crash? Have you successfully reproduced the crash and tested the avoidance with that setting? Or at least eliminated the crash on your remote user devices? – Exemplum

I was not able to reproduce the crash. I did however tested using an edittext with autofill then disabled the autofill by calling importantForAutofill on my oncreate. It worked on disabling autofill. As for the crash let me try to test it more on my side. – Jeavons

Hello. I would like to know if you use TextInputLayout in you application. If so can you paste a copy of the layout file that has this. – Jeavons

It is a super interactive app and there are bunch of them, but here is one: gist.github.com/ozbek/6e1cf0a878efbffa383e87ffd2cdb4bb – Exemplum

I have received crash reports from Google devices too (Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 3, both running Android 9). – Howlyn