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Description of the issue:
Shortcuts/PWAs disappear on Brave (and not Chrome) after phone restart.
This just happened to me again, very frustrating. But more importantly, there have been MANY reports in these forums about this issue over the years, with not much attention from the Brave team, despite some users pointing out it seems to be Brave-specific and not just a Chromium issue.
Here are some of the posts I found, but there’s more. I share these with the hope that, with all of these users’ info combined, this can help the dev team to diagnose the issue and find a solution!
How can this issue be reproduced?
Make shortcuts/PWAs on phone home screen
Restart phone (usually automatic during update)
Cry
Expected result:
No tears. (Brave shortcuts/PWAs should remain regardless of restarts / phone updates)
what if restarting accidentally clears some of Brave’s cache/data that doesn’t happen for Chrome?
what if it has to do with whether or not the shortcuts were added offline or not? (I had to use the airplane-mode trick to get some of them to work)
could it be Samsung-specific? No.. the other users aren’t all Samsung
what if there’s something about a new OS version that triggers a security concern for the old shortcuts/PWAs for some reason?
what if Brave isn’t logging the shortcuts/PWAs properly with the system? so a restart purges them
what if it’s triggered by using custom names for the shortcuts?
what if it’s a factor of how many shortcuts you have… I tried restarting with only one just now and it was fine. scared to try with more… I don’t want to be hurt again so soon
We appreciate the report and I do want to look into this, but it is worth noting that many of the threads you shared above end with the OP coming back to say that the issue is resolved/no longer happening/a Google Play Store update was required to fix the issue.
So just to confirm, you can reproduce this consistently every time? That is, if you create a PWA on your Android device right now, then restart/turn your phone off/on, when it boots up that shortcut gets deleted?
No it doesn’t seem to be consistent, at least not with a manual restart. My last restart was a OS security update automatic restart though… Not sure if I can trigger one of those.
I only tried recreating 1 shortcut also. I tried being offline on creation (so it works properly), giving it a custom name, and placing it into a folder, to see if any of those individually trigger it on restart - Nope. But maybe it only happens with many shortcuts, across different folders, or in the bottom tray, or maybe it’s just, automatic restarts only. Not sure.
I am available to try other things if desired. Maybe those other posts will spark some inspiration for something? In the meantime, I will work on finding & recreating all my old shortcuts.
I will bring this up with the team and see what they say. Based on what you’ve reported and the other reports, this may be tied to an OS update/forced restart – however, I find it highly unlikely that this is only a Brave issue.
What I would ask of you is to create a good handful of shortcuts in both Brave and Chrome (or another Chromium based browser) on the same device and I will do the same, then just check back ever so often to see if the shortcuts are still there.
Oh snap, it happened again! With a manual restart! So it’s not just automatic system restarts.
I recreated 7 of my shortcuts/PWAs and restarted, and they all disappeared again.
I’ve been trying to recreate just one or two then restart, to narrow it down, but haven’t had it happen again- wait I got it, with 2 shortcuts and 1 PWA!
Ok hell yea, I got it to repro with just the 1 PWA! Steps:
Press and hold to drag it, into an already existing folder, on the 2nd home screen, where it will become the 12th item in the folder (look, idk what’s important for this repro, I’m just being specific lol)
Restart phone
Observe the PWA disappears, along with any other shortcuts/PWAs everywhere.
Yes this is an issue with me. I am on the latest brave version and still after the restart the apps disappear. Also the app icons are very inconsistent. Sometimes the icons are created with the brave logo in the corner. Sometimes they don’t get created without the brave icon. The one without the brave icon are the one which disappear after a restart. This issues has not been resolved. I request brave to look into this matter.
Dunno - I got things how I like them so I’m too scared to try to force it, lol.
You can try if you want though: just follow the steps I mentioned above.
..But actually, Mattches said the fix will be released in version 1.93, and my phone still says version 1.92, so I expect the issue will continue happening until that new version is released.
I just checked their release page and it says 1.93 is expected to release on July 28, 2026. So I wouldn’t try it until after getting that update.
Problem with brave PWA is that sometimes the icons don’t have the tiny brave logo. some of them have the brave icon. This is something i don’t understand at all. Also replicating it is also difficult cause its inconsistent.