I have recently published my second app on the Android Market. I've gotten a few e-mails about the app crashing on open, and all users were using the Motorola Backflip. It seems to work fine on all other devices. The app shows the background image, but crashes right after that.
Is there something different I have to do when coding for that device?
The strange thing is that it is very similar to my first app, which seems to work just fine for them. The major difference is that my second app is a paid app, and uses Android Licence Verification. My implementation should catch any license errors though, and I've tested this on my device.
Users have uninstalled and reinstalled the app without success. I'm stumped.
The other thing they're reporting is that the icon doesn't even show properly, but rather is a gear in a box, which makes me think that something goes awry very early in the installation process.
The solution was to have a user install aLogcat on their phone to send me the log.
It had to do with onCreateDialog. I was returning several dialogs, but one of them actually called .show(), which it's not supposed to do, of course. The thing is that this didn't cause an error on any phones except for the Backflip. The emulators also didn't error, or even warn me about it.
I have a motorola backflip and i can say that is not a good product....it's crashing for a lot of things....don't worry, your app is not wrong, the phone is wrong...
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I created an app and it’s live in Google Play. I constantly test it to eliminate bugs and crashes. The app is almost crash-free. But sometimes I receive bad reviews from my users (only Samsung devices users) (1-2% of Samsung devices). They say that the app opens but displays a screen with app title and gets stuck on it (I don’t even have such screen in my app).
I am not receiving any crash reports or ANR reports about something that can be related to this issue. I tested on all Samsung devices I could find (friends, relatives, hired people on Upwork) but everything just works fine.
Is there anything that can cause this issue?
Maybe somewhere in your code does not work on those devices or there is an exception you caught but forgot to log it.
Try analyzing your logs and use some services like Microsoft Appcenter to find out which part of your app does not work properly.
An app I published crashes on certain specific devices. I keep receiving messages from the users that just "can't open" the app. This of course lowers the rating on Google Play.
On Android Vitals there's no reference of these crashes, all crashes I receive are managed and happen after the app start, but if I filter for device model or Android version looking for those that tell me that the app didn't open, I find absolutely NOTHING.
I installed crashlytics, and I was astonished by the fact that I received completely different error communications, so Android Vitals seems just partial?
And anyway, still NOTHING about early crashes.
I tried to install the app on the official Samsung online emulator for some devices that are suspected to crash, and still... guess... NOTHING. So I can't even test it and I'm completely helpless.
How can I do to stop this bad app behaviour, that reduces the number of my happy users? I need a really reliable way to detect ALL crashes.
thank you.
Use a Crash Reporting Tool such as Firebase Crash Reporting. Everyone professional uses such tool
https://firebase.google.com/docs/crash/
As already mentioned, you can use a crash reporting tool/framework, additionally you should be aware, that offline crashed might not get reported and if the user doesn't allow you to use the internet, there is no way around that, as far as I'm aware.
In the meantime you could try excluding the devices that you suspect to produce crashed while you are trying to fix it (if you care about the rating).
I just finished my first Android app. I tested it in the emulator and on my personal device (Nexus 6p). Other folks are installing it and it's working for them. My dad, however, also gave it a try. He has a Samsung Galaxy S6 running 6.0.1, and the app crashes on startup for him.
My guess is it's something touchwiz related. The thing is, he's not the most technical person, as far as getting a logcat would go. So... what are my options to try and investigate this issue?
Crashlytics can help you to retrieve the stack trace and exceptions when your app crashes.
But if you want to test and fix before the deploy, another options is Xamarin Test Cloud, it's a paid solution, but have a free-trial
[EDIT]
Searching in the internet, I found something similar to Xamarin Test Cloud, I personally have not tested this solution, but you can check it out.
TestMunk, they have a free plan.
This is an aspect of the extreme fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. I've seen bugs that manifest only on a specific device from a specific carrier. For example, at one point, Verizon broke ACTION_HEADSET_PLUG on one of their tablets, so that no app would ever receive it. It had worked fine on an earlier firmware version. Naturally, they refused to acknowledge the problem. The same tablet model from T-Mobile never exhibited this issue.
This is why I don't trust the emulator. It's fine for early testing, but you still need to test on the actual hardware that you intend to support. There are online services that test your app on a wide variety of real devices to try to uncover the weird vendor-specific issues. I've never used these services, so I can't recommend one.
I have written an android app that generates a strange exception on the LG-Phone I have just started testing on. In DDMS the tag is "ISP_LOG_MW_DEBUG" and the text is "AMI_IsWindowSearch()." It is generated about 10 times per second while the app is running. It doesn't seem to interfere with the program itself, but I would rather not have this error. but I can not find any information on this on the web.
If a click the home button (the app continues running in the background) and start the app again (new UI, with the old services) the amount of these messages increases each time. So it is reasonable to assume that they are generated by something in the UI.
Has anybody experienced this error or has any idea how to avoid it?
Real devices can sometimes make a lot of noise. Sometimes the vendors just leave a lot of debugging turned on. If your app is not crashing, or showing performance issues, I would say it's safe to ignore.
Also, try with another device, or try with the emulator. If you don't see those errors with another device or the emulator, I think it's safe to say the vendor developers of the the LG device are just lazy and didn't turn off all their debugging like a good developer should. :D
db
I've released an app about a month ago now, and it works as it should on my Desire and presumably on a lot of other phones. However it is also receiving it's fair share of 1 star ratings with comments that say that the sound simply doesn't work. Given that this is an app to play sounds and alarms that's a pretty major problem.
Thankfully one user emailed me to say it didn't work for her, so I at least know one model of phone it's not working on. However I have ZERO idea how you would even begin to work out why code isn't working on a particular phone. If the code is written as per the android docs, and it works in the emulator and on my own phone, I can't begin to work out where to start fixing this.
Any ideas?
If you are contacted by a reasonably advanced user, they could either install a logcat app such as aLogcat or access logcat output over USB if they have the SDK installed, and mail you the output of the phone logs after running your app. It might have some hint as to what is failing.