What you need to know
- Some Pixel phone owners are reporting a "Sim Manager" error.
- If affected, users may find themselves subject to an irritating pop-up that reminds them that the 'Sim-Manager has stopped working.'
- A temporary fix involves uninstalling all updates and reverting the app to the shipping version.
Just like WebView, SIM Manager is an app that's unsexy in its plainness. It's supposed to be invisible, working in the background, handling whatever SIM Managers do if you could be bothered to look it up. So when it bugs out, and users become aware of it, it's a very bad thing. More and more Pixel owners are chiming into a growing thread in the Pixel support forums reporting an error whereby their phone pops up a "Sim Manager has stopped working" error, over, and over, and over again.
Checking the Play Store reveals similarly pleased users. One complains, "Crashes about every 3 minutes. No option to turn it off. Trash isn't nearly strong enough, but I don't like to curse. Has utterly destroyed any pleasure in buying a Pixel 5. Only gave it one star because 0 stars was not an option." Another adds, "All day I get 'Sim Manager stopped working' notifications and it won't let me disable it. The app is useless if using a physical SIM. So incredibly annoying and will more than likely go back to Samsung when I get a new phone." It is a bit melodramatic, but one gets the sense that an incessant oop-up would get old after the first five times.
There is one fix that users have found, and it's pretty much the same as with the same Web View error — uninstalling updates to the SIM Manager app.
It's easy to do by navigating to Settings > Apps > SIM Manager, then tap the three-dot overflow menu at the top of the page, and select Uninstall Update. This should drag the app back to the factory setting, so you should be safe from any future pop-ups.
It is likely a buggy update that's causing the app to crash in the background since it just started happening this week, so expect a future update to fix it. The Pixel 5 is one of the best Android phones this year, so it'd be a shame if Google allowed issues like this to ruin the experience. In the meantime, if you do fall victim to it, you're not without solutions.
