To Android 7 users who experienced crashing and compatibility issues over the weekend, thank you for your patience here as we worked to investigate. We understand how frustrating this crash-on-launch issue has been for Android 7 users, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
Brave supports Android 8 and above, as mentioned on our support page. This means that older operating systems (like Android 7) don’t get important updates like bug fixes and security patches. In February 2024, we found and fixed a critical adblock rule parsing bug that crashed the browser and prevented it from restarting, but unsupported operating system versions never got the fix. Last Saturday (May 24), we inherited an adblock rule from uBlock Origin that passed our checks and validation, but triggered the same crash-on-launch problem on older Brave versions.
Users experiencing this problem on Android 7 can run through the following to get Brave working again:
Upgrade 1.60.125 (broken) → 1.60.127 (fixed). All browser data will be preserved
-
Download the APK from https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.60.127 using a browser or download manager. Please refer to https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Installing-Brave-on-Android#development to pick a correct apk for your CPU architecture. For most Android 7 devices it is arm32 - BraveMonoarm.apk, but some devices use x86 - BraveMonox86.apk
-
Locate the file in your Downloads folder or notification panel
-
Tap the APK file to start installation
-
Follow the prompts - Android will show you what permissions the app requests
-
Tap “Install” to complete the upgrade
Important Security Warning
This build is based on a vulnerable Chromium version and represents an unsupported version of Brave:
- Use at your own risk
- May contain security vulnerabilities
- No official support provided
We’ve updated our backend validation to reduce the risk of shipping crashing adblock rules to users, even on unsupported versions of Brave. We know losing your browser data is incredibly disappointing, and we wish we had a better solution.