Comment 3 for bug 1835076

I can observe the problem in a stock Ubuntu 19.10 VM, after installing the google-chrome-stable deb from chrome.com.
Attaching journalctl, the following lines look like they might be related to the problem:

jul 03 07:11:55 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/appdata/google-chrome.appdata.xml.dpkg-new file: cannot process file of type text/html
jul 03 07:11:55 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop.dpkg-new file: cannot process file of type text/plain
jul 03 07:12:07 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: No valid root node specified
jul 03 07:12:07 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop file: cannot process file of type application/x-desktop
jul 03 07:12:08 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/defaults.list file: cannot process file of type text/plain
jul 03 07:12:08 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/defaults.list file: cannot process file of type text/plain
jul 03 07:12:08 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/defaults.list file: cannot process file of type text/plain
jul 03 07:12:08 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/defaults.list file: cannot process file of type text/plain
jul 03 07:12:08 eoanvm gnome-software[2412]: failed to rescan: Failed to parse /usr/share/applications/defaults.list file: cannot process file of type text/plain