A good number of ZTE smartphone users are experiencing a strange issue with their handsets, with most of them citing the ZTE Max Pro on MetroPCS and ZTE Maven 2 on AT&T as the affected units.

While it’s likely that this issue is affecting more ZTE smartphone users, the company has not yet come out with an official solution to the issue. Apparently, the affected persons say their phones are showing the “Unfortunately, stock Android has stopped” error message, sometimes once a day or in other cases, multiple times.

What makes this error strange is the mention of stock Android, something that is not usual at all for Android devices. It gets even worse given that the usual fixes such as factory resetting are not working, but this doesn’t mean there’s no temporary fix, at least before ZTE rolls out an official fix.

From the various reports put forward by affected users, it appears that there is an app or launcher that is causing the phone to crash. Many of those affected initially associated the issue with the Android system, but this isn’t the case. If anything, this has to do with the ZTE smartphones launcher that runs on top of the stock Android OS. There is a bug in the launcher that causes it to crash frequently, but as noted earlier, a fix has been found.

Since the problem seems to be originating from the phone’s default launcher, it appears that getting a third-party launcher solves the problem. According to MetroPCS support, downloading and installing Evie Launcher works wonders, but you can also turn to other launchers such as Nova Launcher, just in case you don’t like Evie. It’s also possible to solve the problem by blocking all notifications from the Stock Android app in the application settings.

So, until ZTE comes up with a proper fix for this issue, you might want to try out any of these fixes, at least for the time being. Hopefully, it works for you.