I have an Android app in the Play Store. In the last couple of days I've started getting bug reports about "black blocks in the settings screen". Unfortunantely I haven't been able to reproduce the bug on my devices, so everything I know comes from user reports.
I've got the following screenshots from a helpful user:
http://madscientist.pl/temp/bug0.png
http://madscientist.pl/temp/bug1.png
There's supposed to be white text on the tab headers, on the buttons and next to the radio buttons and seek bars. There should also be white horizontal lines separating the options.
The sizes of those black boxes that are visible (the rest is on the black background) correspond to the sizes of letters that are supposed to be there. The text on the two columns of buttons reads "Save" and "Load".
My app can be opened in two modes: live wallpaper and as a "regular app". The problem apparently exists in both versions.
Almost all bug reports describe another characteristic: the settings screen sometimes works correctly and sometimes it doesn't. E.g., sometimes opening the settings activity of the live wallpaper for the second time fixes the problem.
Another person wrote that it works correctly on the first application run only. After that, he has to clear the app data and then again it fails on the second run. So it seems that the bug manifests itself rather unpredictably.
I admit to not being a very good dev and that all the text is put directly in the layout files instead of in strings.xml. It was never an issue before, but just in case I'm in the process of establishing if putting the strings in strings.xml helps with one of the users.
The problem seems to be independent of the device. I've got reports from Samsung, Motorola, LG and Nexus users.
From what I've established so far, for at least one of the users the problem happens on both current and previous version of my app. The previous version was in the store since January 2015. The current version is a month old. I've been getting bug reports for just over a week now so this doesn't seem to be (directly) caused by some change I made to the app.
This led me to believe that the new Android version that has been rolling out recently (at least I've got 5.1 a week ago) is the reason. However I've got bug reports from a user who runs the app on 5.0.2 and 4.4.4.
The app is moderately popular and has a stable amount of downloads, so the fact that in the last week I've got a dozen reports of this bug, and before that I've never heard of it, leds me to believe that it indeed started happening over a week ago. So apart from the bug itself, it's really beyond my understanding what made it appear just now, if neither application update nor system update seem to be related.
I could provide more data, but the question is already terribly long. Let me know what else you think could be helpful.
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First off, this has never happened before on any other android device I've used (multiple devices have been tried and tested before this).
Now I have an app that I have worked on for a little over a year now, it is called AutomatedId (on the app store) and it has worked quite well for my company for quite some time.
Recently I have been given a device to add compatibility to the app (specifically for reading UHF tags) but that isn't the problem.
The problem comes whenever you open the app, the screen stops reading inputs completely, as well as buttons cease to function. I turned on developer options to see the screen inputs and as i suspected, it completely stops and does not read any of the inputs after the app is opened. Clicks don't work, buttons don't work, keyboard doesn't open, hardware buttons on the device stop working. It's a mess, does anyone know what could have caused this?
This is a S98 from here: http://www.wepoy.com/product_view_18.html
moved my comment to the answer as you said. This may be due to memory leak. Here are some references that may help you fix them: Fixing-Memory-Leaks-in-Android-Studio & use this library from square to detect memory leaks early: leakcanary
we're developing an cordova android app with angularJS/Ionic. We installed our app on several devices and everything worked fine for a week or two. But since a few days the app randomly becomes black while in use. You can "resurrect" the app when you click the hardware back-button. It seems like the whole GUI is black but all services are still running.
The next problem is, that we have no access to the devices and our own devices don't show this behaviour.
Maybe anyone here has experienced something similar and can help me work it out or can provide us a few good ideas for logging this kind of errors on android?
I have incredibly hard problem to pinpoint.
I have a project which is not really important here (actually tested it on other project, same thing, and also on another computer, same thing) with typical hierarchy. Within it I use custom views, and also use custom views from my external library (which initially thought is the cause, but it isn't as the same thing happens with custom views within src of the same project). I use some of those custom views inside my xml's defining views. I had a need to debug some operations going on within one of those custom view classes. So I set couple breakpoints, ran the project, and when the runtime hit them I saw this screen:
As you see the debugging is broken although the breakpoint is hit on exact line I put it. I cannot do anything here though, except resuming it or terminating it. All the "step in/out" options are greyed out, and the stack trace for the main thread is literaly gone.
This happens on the Galaxy S4 (i9500) that I aquired lately. I cannot say for certain, but I'm pretty sure on my previous Galaxy S+ (i9001) it did not happen.
More information for you:
My i9500 is rooted with custom kernel flashed. The DDMS screen also does not show any processes that are going on on my device (was deffinetly showing on galaxy s+ I had before):
As you see, the processes are being shown just fine inside an emulator, but there are no processes (the application process for the project, after I run it is being shown there, but nothing else).
As for emulator, same machine (tested on both), same environment, same projects, and no problems with debugging it whatsoever:
As you see, everything is perfect over here.
Another important information is that it only happens (from what I see) when xml views are being processed. When I create a reference to one of my custom views manually, debugging works as expected on both the emulator, and the device. So far, it only happens when the breakpoint is being hit when the xml view is being processed.
The last piece of information is that my Device Chooser when I deploy application, shows empty space inside the Debug column. I don't know if it's relevant or not.
I've lost almost 5 hours now looking for solution of this problem (and the cause) on the web, without any luck.
From all the circumstances, it seems the problem is with galaxy s4 I have, not with the computer, or the IDE, or the project itself, but the question is, what is the problem. Tried reinstalling samsung drivers, tried uninstalling those and installing PDA.net drivers alone. No help.
If anybody of you will be able to figure out this puzzle, you are God. Besides that, you will have my deepest gratitude, as this issue is driving me nuts.
ps. I have all the android SDK's up to date, and eclipse plugin as well.
Half the answer (so far).
Upon updating to new 4.3 update, and new custom kernel (Perseus Kernel alfa 14), the DEBUG flag is shown in the Device Chooser dialog screen, and is set to YES. Also, the processes are now visible in DDMS.
Unfortunetly, still the stack is empty once the breakpoints are hit in the custom views.
I do have a problem and have very little to go on. I'm about to release an App (created with Air for Android As3) on the Samsung App Store and just got a list of issues that have to be resolved after the app has been tested by samsung staff before the app could be released.
I did manage to solve almost all of the issues, but 1 very important one is beyond me. They say the screen turns/stays black, when returning after the device alarm interrupted the app. This issue practivally happend on all their devices, including a group including the phones I own (e.g. Galaxy S3).
I do have "OnDeActivate" and "OnActivate" listeners in place that are there to pause the app, disable sound etc. if it loses focus, gets minimized etc., yet I checked on my devices and I can't reproduce this error. Meaning if the app gets interrupted on my device by the alarm, I can resume it without any problems. no black screens.
So the question is: Is there any way for me to fix that at all? I do have to work within AirForAndroid AS3 so I guess possibilities are limited. Any clues where I can look? Any listeners to set, or is there a way to maybe "force" the app to reinitialize or refresh the display? Or to listen for the system alarm? Help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I am trying to overcome the same issue, I read somewhere that setting the stage quality to something else on both the activate and deactivate events might solve the issue.
So just set your stage quality to medium or whatever different in the deactivate and set it back to what it needs to be in the activate.
This should make AIR snap out of that black screen for the alarm (I hope)
An app of mine is with this fix is currently undergoing testing on the Samsung App Store.
I hope it fixes it.
Good news, the dirty fix of toggling the stage quality seems to have worked for Samsung, it has not shown up in their latest certification report of my app.
by the way, this is not for a stage3D app, that's different
It's for a GPU app
When the app loses focus on Android (goes into background) it will lose the context, which among other things mean that you lose all the created graphics, cached objects and like.
You didn't specify what kind of app it is. If you're using Stage3D, that means you'll have to recreate all your textures, and if you're on plain old displaylist, you'll have to recreate any bitmaps that were created at runtime, and redraw your screen at least once (so the vector graphics get redrawn too).
Now, if you're using Starling, for example, it can take care of recreating context for you (there's a flag for enabling that), although you'll still have to recreate dynamically created bitmaps.
I have a very simple Android app. It is one Activity with Text and Buttons, and as you click on the buttons (onTouch events), they become invisible and the text changes.
This works fine for Android 3 and Android 2.3.3 simulators, but when I use the BlackBerry nature in Eclipse to send the app to a BlackBerry playbook simulator, funny things happen. As I click on the buttons they go invisible, but other buttons change too.
Buttons that were only ever visible, stay visible. Some Buttons that were invisible, become visible. Some buttons that had become visible earlier, return to being invisible.
It feels like a redraw problem, or some strange caching on the button state.
Anybody got any ideas? Wild guess excepted ...
Get a playbook or wait until RIM updates their broken simulator.
I converted an app for the playbook and the code was running fine on the simulator. It's a very simple app too, like a binary calculator. A couple of toggleButtons, Buttons and a TextView.
The app had visual issues, similar to yours. Buttons disappeared. Buttons were highlighted when I pressed buttons around them. ToggleButtons didn't change state. And much much more.
Since I don't have a playbook I couldn't test it on a real device. I tried layout changes, code changes and tried different settings. But nothing helped, those issues stayed.
After some reading in their forum I came to the conclusion that this might be an issue with the simulator.
So I submitted the app to the AppWorld 5 days ago. It got approved today.
So there is a chance that your app is alright, and the problem is the simulator.