Adding or Removing Sports Teams Or Stocks In Google Now Currently Causes It To Crash Endlessly

Listen up, Android users. If you’re using Google Now, don’t go to its Settings -> My Stuff and try to modify sports teams or stocks right now, as doing so completely borks the whole app. As soon as you go back to the main screen or click into Search, you will experience a force close. Repeated attempts to restart it will result in a crash as well:

The only thing that works is clearing out Google Search’s data in Settings -> Applications, after which you need to re-enroll into Google Now. Changing your Home or Work locations does not seem to trigger the issue – it’s just sports teams and stocks.

All of my devices are affected as well as devices of all AP team members I’ve asked. There are reports of the same on the web, and even TechCrunch picked it up, though, without too many details.

For the curious, here they are:

  

The crash seems to be occurring in StockDataInfoProvider, which I presume is responsible for handling stocks. Since it seems to have started recently, I think Google changed something on the backend, which caused unexpected data to come back from Search servers and crash some part of the app that doesn’t catch exceptions.

Hopefully, Google will pick up on this and release an update or fix the backend soon, preferably before I/O.