I have an Android app using the CastCompanionLibrary v2.9.1, modified to use play-services-cast:10.0.1 (just a simple change to the gradle dependencies).
Short version: The app is attempting to automatically connect to the ChromeCast device, without user interaction.
Long version:
Since updating the CCL library to use play services 10.0.1, I've had several users mention that the app is automatically connecting/casting to ChromeCast without user interaction.
Some users have said they're not using the app, then they connect to WiFi, and the app automatically attempts to cast. Others have said they are using the app, they don't press the ChromeCast button, and the app begins casting.
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I'm having trouble figuring out where to look for potential changes to the ChromeCast APIs which might explain what's going on. I'm also not sure whether this issue is only occurring for my app, or for many other ChromeCast enabled apps. Lastly, I'm not able to reproduce this issue on my own ChromeCast device.
Any help would be appreciated.
I had not seen or heard this before, so here are some pointers for you to do further investigation to see what can be the cause. CCL has a (sticky) service called ReconnectionService that is responsible to perform reconnection attempts when you lose wifi and later gain it back. The wifi scenario you had mentioned resembles this so I would suggest to start from there. In order to only reconnect when it makes sense, it gets the time length of the content that is playing and only makes such attempts for that period of time; i.e. if you start playing a content that is for 1 hr and then you leave your phone on the table and pick it up after 2 hrs, it notices that the last movie before it fell sleep was for 1 hr so it won't make any attempt to reconnect (see handleTermination() in that same class). For live-stream that doesn't have a clear content duration, CCL uses a default of 2hrs but allows apps to modify that by calling VideoCastManager.setLiveStreamDuration(duration_in_seconds) method. Finally, the whole reconnection relies on a few factors: it saves the route-id of the last connection, along with the session ID. So if needed, you can clear any of these and then it won't try to reconnect for that particular session (in case you want to keep reconnection for some and disable on some other). Hope these help to troubleshoot the issue.
So it turns out there's a bug in Android Support Library 25.1.0 which was causing this issue.
https://code.google.com/p/google-cast-sdk/issues/detail?id=1105
Which is now marked as 'fixed internally'.
Also related:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=232326
Related
I have an app I have building that is giving navigation from a location to a location. Contstantly tracking where the user is using GPS data in order to give good Directional information. Currently if a user switches from our app to another app or goes to the Android home screen, after one minute Android turns off our app for performance reasons.
I have tried using an Isolate but like flutter this gets shutdown. Next step were to use a kotlin service to handle background things but i wanted to check if anyone had done this in dart yet?
Also this is not an app that will be in the play store or on public devices. It is going on special devices that we control and are less worried about memory usage as this will be the main app ran on them.
as mentioned above in the comment by #galloper background_fetch is the thing you need, it has a method called BackgroundFetch.registerHeadlessTask(backgroundFetchHeadlessTask); where backgroundFetchHeadlessTask is a function that will keep running even when the app is close, i used this in my app to stream location info to server.
Hey does anyone know if it's possible to intercept incoming calls via an app for both IOS and Android (no jailbreak) then based on certain criteria the phone takes action?
Have already read a few posts saying it's not possible however they are quite old, anyone know of anything new?
Thanks!
The short answer:
On Android: You can do this, but this may require special treatment for different vendors and/or OS versions. It won't be simple to support all (or at least most) devices, but with a lot of manual trial and error, it can be done.
On iOS: It's not possible locally, as Apple sees it as an invasion to the user's privacy.
The (slightly) longer explanation:
What is possible, for both iOS and Android, but will probably require a lot more work and external support than you originally planned, is to divert the calls via a server. This way, when someone calls you, the call is "stolen" by the server (which the user has to manually allow when installing the app) and the call is received on your device as a VOIP call, allowing the app (on the server side) full control over the call (which ones are actually received on the device, what's played, how long, recording, etc). You can see this app for an example of how it works: https://yallo.com/.
I hope this helps. Good Luck.
Android M has a new feature called App Standby where an app is put into an idle state when it's not being utilized (see docs) and, among other things, its network access is disabled.
I can't seem to figure out a way to determine when the app goes into and out of this state (via a broadcast intent or something of the like) and I really need to as my app relies on having network periodically to check the status of a server.
Can someone help me figure out how to determine when my app goes into and out of idle state?
I've been digging through the M preview 2 source and down through the calls of $ adb shell am set-inactive it appears that there's a AppIdleStateChangeListener but it appears to only be used internally to Android and isn't exposed to us lowly developers who want to know when our apps can use the internet :-(
So far, it appears that when ACTION_POWER_CONNECTED is broadcast, all apps come out of standby...this is a potential workaround if Google doesn't expose something for us before release.
I am writing a sample application for detecting iBeacons through android app. I am using the code from the following site https://github.com/AlvinBert/android-ibeacon-Jaalee-source-code
With the code from the above site i can able to detect ibeacons and send notifications. When i check the running apps, there is 1 Service running.
If i close my application, by long press the home key and remove my app from the Recent list, then i didn't get the notifications, but still 1 service is running.
I debug the code and found that "IncomingHandler" is not getting fired which is in the service inside the "com.communicate.ibeacon.service.IBeaconService" package.
I need this to be called continuously, even after the application closes. Since, i am new to android could you please point me what to do, to achieve this.
Thanks
Jai
The beacon library you mention is an unauthorized copy of the Pro Android iBeacon Library formerly provided by Radius Networks. As the original author of that library, I can confirm that it would not detect beacons after the app being killed until a power cycle of the phone takes place. Unfortunately, this library had been discontinued by my company over licensing issues.
Library issues aside, one approach you could take to accomplish your goal is to use Androud Broadcast Intents to automatically re-launch your app based on system events like power connected and disconnected. This will not relaunch immediately, but will typically do so once a day when a device is in normal use.
I have a Bike computer app that logs data while the user is riding. I have had a user report an issue I had not considered. He was out for a long ride (100+ miles) but while out and logging data the app got updated via Google plays auto-update. This unfortunately killed off the app mid recording and the user lost data till they spotted what had happened and restarted the app.
Ideally I would like to be able to programmatic stop the auto-update happening while the app is data logging. All my research indicates that this is not possible possible but I may of missed something so dose anyone know of a way of doing this?
Given no solution the best I can do is advice the users to enable the update only over wifi option in the Play app which in this instance would of helped. Unfortunately one of the key points about my app is that it will log indoor sessions using ANT+ sensors so I have a good number of people using it with wifi active.
Edit
I managed to do the experiment to see what happens myself last night. I had an app going in the background data logging then pushed a new version to Google Play. Unfortunatly it was not picked up totaly automaticaly when I had to leave 10 hours latter but I opened up the play store app and it found the update it did not start updating automaticaly but I forced it. The act of downloading and installing the new version killed off what was in progress. It was already dead before I used the notification to go to the new version.
As you say yourself, you can't do that what you are asking for. You could hack your way around it by changing the permissions each time you update. The users will then be prompted about it in the regular way.
I'm not sure about the "life-cycle" for automatic updated apps that are running. But I read somewhere that is wasn't the re-install but the reopen of the app that crashed it. If that is the case you could set a flag indicating that the user is currently logging and then on restart just resume the logging. But again we need to know more about the inner workings of activities/apps which are running and get an automatic update (actually didn't think it could happen).
Edit
Based on your findings I'd say you have to handle the app is shut down in onDestroy etc. or/and make sure you save everything persistently. Then you might need to have 2 apps where 1 listens to the other being re installed and when that happens it starts it up again (there is an interesting discussion here). If you are targeting api >= 12 then the broadcast action ACTION_MY_PACKAGE_REPLACED might also have interest.