cr_VariationsUtils: Failed reading seed file

Question

I am getting this log when I start a fragment after selecting language for the first time, i.e changing Locale and also first time string resources are loaded based on selected language.

E/cr_VariationsUtils: Failed reading seed file "/data/user/0/com.example.sample/app_webview/variations_seed_new": /data/user/0/com.example.sample/variations_seed_new (No such file or directory)  E/cr_VariationsUtils: Failed reading seed file "/data/user/0/com.example.sample/app_webview/variations_seed": /data/user/0/com.example.sample/app_webview/variations_seed (No such file or directory) 

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, this error can safely be ignored.

Chromium, the browser engine underlying Android webviews, serves different variations of Chrome settings to different users to measure the impact of experiments and new features (Chrome privacy whitepaper, see the "Chrome Variations" section). Deciding which variations to serve is based on a random seed, which is cached in a "seed file" according to the VariationsUtils source. I don't know why reading the seed file fails, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems with the Android webviews in the running app, so just ignore this error.