Exiting Messenger chat heads/bubbles on MIUI 12 causes phone to freeze/reboot, as per many reports

MIUI 12 has been stealing the limelight for all the wrong reasons lately. There have been a bunch of complaints doing rounds about the update, so much so that we an entire section dedicated to it.

And the latest one involves something as trivial as chat heads or bubbles on the Messenger app by Facebook. According to users, exiting the bubbles causes the phone to suddenly freeze or hang.

After updating to Miui 12, I’ve noticed that sometimes, when I try to close Messenger chatheads my phone just freezes and I have to restart the my phones by holding down the power button.
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Whenever I close my Facebook messenger chat head and close recent apps every time phone crashes and hangs and then after about 15 mins it reboots itself.
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The only way to get out of this state is by force rebooting by holding down the power button for around ten seconds. Moreover, re-installing the app and clearing its cache/data doesn’t help.

It is worth mentioning here that Android 11 has added native chat bubbles support at the system level. They are basically what Messenger has had for years but have been now made available to other apps as well.

By this, it could be possible that the Android 11 system-level chat bubbles are conflicting with the chat heads overlay from the Messenger app and causing all this chaos.

And the fact that most complaints have only started recently and are mostly limited to Poco F2 Pro does testify to this. The device only recently bagged the Android 11 update.

However, the thing is that the Poco F2 Pro isn’t the only device facing this issue. There have been several reports from other devices as well like the Mi 10, Poco F1, Redmi Note 8 Pro, Mi 9T Pro, and probably more.

And not every device from the aforementioned is on Android 11 which indicates that there is something else at play. It could be possible that the culprit is in fact a bad MIUI 12 update.

However, going by the available evidence, it is virtually impossible to pinpoint what MIUI 12 update version is exactly behind the Messenger chat heads issue.

That said, a few users reported that they were able to work around the issue by installing an older version of the Messenger app. You can do the same by heading over to this APKMirror link.

Anyway, we will continue tracking the MIUI 12 Messenger chat heads bug and update the article as and when new developments emerge. For now, if interested, be sure to check out our Xiaomi Android 11 update tracker.

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