Chrome OS Has a Major Android Pie Bug: How to Fix It

Android Pie is still in the early stages of rolling out to Chromebooks, but we've already seeing news of a performance-crippling bug to worry about. Fortunately, there's also a fix.

This news (and its fix) comes from Chrome Unboxed, which spotted Reddit threads that deduced the bug was limited to Chromebooks on Chrome OS 72, with the Play Store and Android 9. 

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How bad is the bug? It can create extreme delays in drag and drop with the touchpad, and — at its worst — leave the entirety of a Chromebook's CPU capabilities drained even during an idle state. Fortunately, Android Pie isn't on many Chromebooks at this stage — just Pixel Chromebooks and the Samsung Chromebook Plus V2 — but that should change in the coming months.

We haven't noticed this issue on our Google Pixelbook yet, but Chrome Unboxed talked to a Chromium developer, Elijah T., who believes the performance bugs are tied to the "recent integration of memory information" in the most recent version of Chrome OS.

To solve this issue, click Shift+Escape to open the Task Manager, right-click on a column headers, and un-check "Memory footprint."