Over the weekend, many people were impacted by what appears to be a server-side experiment with Google Now. The issue left those who use the Google Now Launcher, the Pixel launcher or the Google app on their phone useless for personalized information. The cards would not display save one that simply stated “Failed to load cards”. I was met with this issue on all three of my main devices: Google Pixel XL, Nexus 9 and Huawei P10.
Fortunately there is what seems to be a rather quick and easy fix to this issue: Clear the data on the Google app on your devices. I did this on all three of my devices mentioned above and afterwards, the Google Now cards displayed as expected. If you know how to clear data in an app, try the trick and let me know if it also works for you. If you don’t know how to do this, keep reading and I’ll walk you through the steps.
On your Android phone or tablet, go to Settings>Apps (or it may be All Apps depending on your device & Android version). Scroll down until you find the Google app then tap it. The top section of
Manage Data on Google app for Android
the page you see will have an area named Storage. Tap this and you should be to a page that looks like or similar to the screenshot in this post. Now tap on the Manage Space button and tap the Clear All Data button. You will get a pop-up warning that lets you know your Google Search, Feed and Google Now Launcher data will be deleted which is the objective of this exercise. Tap OK and the deed is done.
Some users have reported that instead of using the Manage Space and Clear All Data button that they have been able to achieve the same fix by tapping the Clear Cache data. I, for one, was not. I had the same “Failed to load cards” error after trying to clear the cache. You could give this a go on your phone first rather than the deleting of everything. It won’t hurt, it just may mean that you have to go through this process twice if it doesn’t work for you.
Which ever method you use and works, you should now be able to go into the Google app and setup the Now cards once again. This should be a matter of a couple of taps as all of your preference will have been backed up to your Google account and be restored for you.
Give these a try and see if it solves the issue for you. Do drop a line and let me know too.
