Been having fun experimenting with the new Terminal app. And I'm excited to try out some of the AOSP backports the team introduced in 2025031300. Just wanted to save other users time, grief, and needless data loss with (what appears to be) an upstream AOSP bug.
If you're getting "Unrecoverable Errors" or you're stuck on "Preparing Terminal" and you're using a VPN, try this workaround before wiping your data. Try disabling the following (this is in order of least drastic to most drastic, so stop when you get the desired result):
- Go to your VPN app and turn off your VPN (if you're not on always-on mode)
- Go to Settings > Network & Internet > VPN > [Your VPN app here] > Gear Icon and disable "Block connections without VPN"
- As #2, but disable "Always-on VPN" then wait until the problem abates and re-enable Always-On.
I found I had to do #3 on initial setup of the Terminal app, then use #2 whenever I start a new session. Maybe AVF can't/won't access a VPN connection and gets blocked by this setting? Regardless, looks like an upstream issue based on this post a month ago from the Android Beta subreddit.