Client came to me needing me to create a cash back calculator on their WordPress site http://onetouchrelo.com/
Did it with Caldera forms and seems to work on every device and browser I've tested it on, but the client and one other person at their office say's the calculator doesn't work on their Galaxy S4's. There are other people there with S4's (and any other device for that matter) that it's working fine for. The problem is that whatever the first number is he types, for the incentive it just repeats that number over and over instead of calculating. eg. 3333333, or 5555555.
I've tried removing all of the CSS from the form and just stripping it down to basics, deactivating plugins, all the normal stuff. Nothing seems to fix it for these two guys' phones. They say they're on kit kat and everything else works fine on the site for them. I am at a loss O_o
Generally, if you have multiple test cases that work with a piece of software and one device that does not work, your troubleshooting should begin with the device itself.
You mentioned that other devices of type Galaxy S4 are able to use the app. In that case check to see if the OS versions match on the ones that do and don't work. Check that there are no updates needed for the device. Recommend using another mobile browser to use the app like Chrome or Firefox and see if that alleviates the issue.
Lastly, Power off the device and try accessing the web app again.
If it still does not work, then the last resort is to try a factory reset to see if that clears the issue - after backing up their data. But, this seems to be device specific based on what you have mentioned.
Related
I'm having trouble with an app I published that sends user notifications.
The notifications are called from a background service that checks for a boolean that gets saved to SharedPreferences when the user selects to enable notifications or not.
However, I've had some users on the Galaxy S5s say that they can't turn them off (I test with nexus devs and have beta testers on m8, etc). How do I address this issue?
What is the strategy for solving problems that arise only for specific devices?
IMO, Android kinda sucks in that regard. There is absolutely no way to guarantee that if one piece of code that works on one device works on another one. Since Android is open source, manufacturers usually modify the firmware to make it kinda customized. However, they sometimes change things that will affect performance of a single function.
It is even worse! Your code might work on S4 with Android JellyBean, but not work with the same device Android Kitkat. Anyways, no - there is no way to debug without the actual device. However, you can log different events in your code and use an analytic service (like Google Analytics) and send the data to your database to study and figure out the problem. This is the method that I typically use in such cases.
If the problem is that the app crashes on some device. It is even easier. Users need to press on the "send crash data" button - so you can study the log on your developer account.
I've developed a couple of Enterprise iOS apps for our users in the field. Some have expressed a preference for Android devices over Apple, and I fully understand. I do not have an Android phone, nor do I want to get one and have a second account to maintain. I'm wondering if I can use an inexpensive Android tablet to reliably test an application that will ultimately be running on an Android phone? The app will need to communicate via internet to a server via cell connection or wifi.
Also, any advice for an Android newbie developer would be appreciated.
Yes you could test on a Android tablet but it would be hard to see how it render on a phone.
You could also use the Android Emulator to test different size and android configuration.
Yes. I developed my first major Android app using only a couple of cheap tablet devices. It's fine; the only thing you can't really test is "what happens to my app when a phone call comes in." Plus if you can get the emulator working under HAXM, or some other similar setup where it doesn't work like a tortoise trapped in amber, you can test on a variety of simulated devices perfectly well.
Other things to consider:
You'll probably want to test your app on a variety of different hardware and Android versions, in particular I'd recommend testing on older devices. This means that you friends' old Android phones are a great source of cheap test devices. I regularly gather phones from friends that would otherwise just end up lingering in the back of a drawer as a "spare" that will never actually get used. Bear in mind that you can use all the features of a phone apart from the actual phone bit without a SIM, including a WiFi-based data connection.
You may find that you can find good, contract-free "pay as you go" phone SIMs. I use a provider whose "credits" don't expire, so I have a phone connection for my test devices where there's no ongoing cost, apart from the actual calls I make when testing.
I've been developing a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Due to time/budget constraints, we initially selected PhoneGap/Cordova as mobile app framework so we could write once and deploy to both platforms.
This plan has worked fine for iOS, but we're finding that Android's browser/engine is kind-of a piece of garbage (to put it nicely). Every time we add a new feature, we find one more thing that the Android browser doesn't support, or only partially supports, or fully supports but will randomly fail from time to time, etc. Even once we code around the Android issues and get things working smoothly, test it on multiple devices/versions, and deploy a new app to the Android market, we immediately start getting emails and reports from customers who can't get the app to work on their device. We have them uninstall/reinstall, reboot their phone to clear the memory, etc., and their device still consistently fails (and by "fail", I mean it typically just freezes and/or won't respond to touch input - it usually doesn't crash, or anything). The app works fine for most people, but there are still quite a few devices that inexplicably fail.
I don't mean for this to be a rant, I'm trying to analyze whether the Android+PhoneGap path is the correct path for us. Specifically, I'd like to find out the following:
Are there people out there having success with an Android+PhoneGap app? or is Android+PhoneGap always going to be a problem on certain devices?
Am I likely to have more luck with a native Android app (I've never attempted one)? Or are multiple devices/versions always a problem on Android, even with a Native app?
1) Yes. There are are good apps which are based on Phonegap and works well in all devices.
2) It depends on what features of the Android you are going to use. Few versions that does not support some features that's available only to new version.
BTW, what is the minimum required version that you have selected for your app? I assume you are developing the app with Android as base version.
When creating a new Android project, you have to set the minimum required platform version. If you set something higher and use the app in a lower version which does not support the feature, results are going to be different.
After having worked with Android+Cordova for some time now, I have the following suggestions/comments for anyone thinking of going that direction.
Consider using Sencha Touch, or jQuery Mobile, or another mobile framework that has already coded around the Android-browser issues (which there are a LOT of). Consider not straying too far from the default styling that come with those frameworks. Simply styling a normal web page to look like a mobile app is a constant headache to get working on multiple versions of the stock Android browser.
Although the stock Android browser is garbage, Mobile Chrome is pretty nice. In Android 4.4, the Chrome engine becomes the default engine used by a webview of an Android app. If you don't like Sencha or jQuery Mobile or the like, you could hold off and just use a mobile web site for a while until Android 4.3 and below become insignificant. It's not hard to get things working on Mobile Chrome.
Even without Sencha/JQM, you can still muscle your way around the stock browser issues, but it's almost as frustrating as developing for IE6. Okay, maybe not that bad… but close.
I've started experimenting some with a native Android app, and, so far, it seems like less of a headache than building an app with Android+Cordova+lackOfSenchaOrJQMorTheLike. The things I've experimented with work pretty consistently among different Android versions. But I don't have much experience there, so I can't comment too much on a native Android app.
I need to know what are the steps in modifying the phone.apk app on android, which allows to call and receive calls (and what is shown upon talking on the phone).
What do I need to do (of course I have a rooted device)? is it possible to do the tests on the emulator first?
my guess is that I first need to fetch get its source somehow, use some kind of system signing, do the changes and put it forcefully into the device, maybe also restarting it.
However, I've never done such a thing and I couldn't find much help in xda forums and here, maybe because it's pretty hardcore thing to do , plus it might not work well on some devices.
I've noticed that the only thing that shows this is possible is the calls-recorder patch, which is incredibly cool by itself.
First thing is you need source code. Phone app heavily depends on the radio interface layer and radio interface layer is proprietory to what kind of communications processor they use.
I believe you cannot test on emulator unless you are working on nexus family of devices. Also phone app runs on a particular shareduserid which can break other apps running with same shared user Id . So you will need platform certificate for signing which is next to impossible for release version of phone software.
One thing you could do is download cyanogenmod code for your phone , do changes , build and download the whole of software on the phone rather than just phone apk.
We have an existing web site, and I've been asked to test its compatibility with mobile browsers.
I've installed the Android SDK onto my desktop PC. I'm able to view my localhost site in the emulator, and I have identified a number of glitches in the page layout which occur in the Android browser.
But since none of these issues occur in any desktop browser, I've been struggling with how to debug them. For example, in Firefox, it's very easy to use Firebug to see what stylesheets have been appies and to adjust them on the fly to see how it affects the layout. But I haven't found a way to do anything similar on the Android emulator.
The question is, short of trial+error, how do I go about working out what is causing those layout issues? Does the Android browser (or the Android SDK) have any kind of tools that are useful for debugging CSS? If so, how do I use them?
[EDIT] I haven't found a solution to this, so I'm throwing open the doors to the bounty hunters...
Weinre is probably the closest to what you're looking for:
If what you're looking for is something that allows you to tweak layout in realtime it should make you happy.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc?hl=en-US
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cllkoedgiefnomcccogcalmjogjfcpji?hl=en-US
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cghdkdcepiflkhaddpomjehcmdojgobh?hl=en-US
I found several options that appear as though they should work for you if an emulator/simulator will suffice or at least get you started. The benefit to this is that the Chrome Developer Tools appear to work with the add-ons!
Personally, I would much prefer to do this on actual Android hardware. In usage a touch screen handset is quite different to even the most accurate emulator; things such as gamma, pixel density, performance, touch interaction (are your links big enough?), portrait/landscape orientation and even the fact you hold it in your hand makes it quite different to the desktop experience. If you want to see how well your site works on mobile/Android, get a cheap second hand device to test on!
As for the debugging; I always include my own "log" function which creates a div#console if the firebug/browser console is unavailable. This works reasonably well for debugging on a handset with the caveat that it covers part of the content. You can then print out the current style of an object with something like
log(window.getComputedStyle(document.getElementById("myobj"));
Note: The above will not work in IE.
You may have already seen this, but the SDK Documentation Site has some basic information on developing and debugging web apps on Android:
Web Apps Overview
Debugging Web Apps
Hope that Helps!
I don't know how you detect a mobile device but I detect a client with the user agent. Because of this I can simply send a different user-agent string to test CSS which works fairly well.
For Firefox I use User Agent Switcher. Additionally I use the Web Developer tool not only to view all settings but also the Resize option to simulate the viewport width.
Apple's Safari has a developer extension and within also a User Agent Switcher. You can add your own User Agent string.
Chrome provides tools for doing this now. Just visit:
chrome://inspect/
With your device connected and ADB running - you can then use all of the Chrome web element inspection tools. This works with the browser, but also with any app that renders in a WebView (e.g. Cordova).