Get rid of all user data of Android application after bigger update - android

I completely revamped an app. Tested it for a while on my device and emulator. The app worked fine. However when I updated the app through the Android market, my users experienced crashes.
Since there is no way to properly debug this procedure I asume the crash is caused by old data which is not being removed from the device (probably from the onsavedstate bundle?!).
Is there a way to do a "clean/total" reinstall without having the user to do it manually?
Best Regards
Johe

When the variable that's giving you trouble is overwritten with the proper type on the next OnPause, the class cast problem should be gone. You could reserve one variable to hold a version number and if the one you retrieve from OnResume is older you skip the other saved values and use the defaults.

Related

how to get and store android app startup launching time

How to get value of application launching time,
from available solution on android log is printed like this I/ActivityTaskManager: Displayed com.android.demo.MainActivity: +1s751ms
Any solution to store this value in variable to use further
I don't think is possible to store that value somehow outside Android Studio because this things and others involving performance issues are viewable only inside SDK. For further references see this:
https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals/launch-time

Debug Android app crash on startup without logcat or ACRA

I'm having a problem where an app I'm developing is working on mobile devices (tested on 4 different devices), but crashing when I try to test it on my tablet. The tablet I'm using is a Tesco Hudl 2, which, although being a good quality low cost device, lacks adb drivers and so you can't debug apps through USB and get the Logcat data. The app was developed using Android Studio.
With other apps I have developed, I have just set up ACRA in the project so I can still get debug information from a crash. This time however, the app is crashing without any information from ACRA and so I'm not quite sure what is going wrong. I'm pretty sure I've set up ACRA correctly given that I've used it in several projects before and see nothing wrong this time. Can it be that whatever is going wrong is happening too early for ACRA to catch?
I have pulled out all the code from the activity so the only thing that happens in code is that ACRA gets initialized in the derived Application class (note that the crash exists without ACRA). The app also uses Google maps and a provider for search suggestions. If there is any code anyone wants to see just ask, but I'm unsure what exactly to post up since everything else was stripped out. So, does anyone have any idea on what I can do to solve this, or what tools I can use to catch whatever sort of errors happen so early in the apps lifecycle?
Thanks
Update with strange behaviour... Downloaded Crashlytics and it also did not catch the crash. I copied the project and removed every .java file except the Application, Activity and provider. The provider functions were empty (save for the return value of 0/false/null/whatever), the application class just initialized Crashlyitcs and the Activity class was empty. This then worked, I was even able to add in a lot of the code and get the google map to load.
Now if I do the same in my main project, except don't delete the .java files, the crash still happens. The classes in these files are not used so I have no idea how they can be causing the crash. Otherwise all the xml, gradle, resources are identical (except the package and app name). Very confusing...
Consider using one of the apps to view logcat on the device:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nolanlawson.logcat
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jtb.alogcat
Also try using Crashlytics. Maybe it will catch your crash?
But yeah, it's possible to have a crash before any crash reporter (ACRA or Crashlytics) will have a chance to catch it.
And one more note, maybe there is a way to enabled ADB over WiFi.
Normally you would need to enable it via adb but maybe in case of this cheap and strange tablet, there is an option for that enabled in the ROM?
Ok! So it's 1am and I decided to have one final attempt to fix, which I think I did. In my manifest, I had things like
<activity
android:name=".MyActivity"
...
for example, and while this worked fine on the mobiles, for some reason the Hudl required the complete package name, i.e. com.mypackage.MyActivity. Not sure why this is the case but it appears to have fixed the problem.

Get crash information when debugger is not attached?

I'm developing an app using Android Studio. Now I'm facing a bug where the app crashes when I do the following:
Press the home button.
Use the device for some 10 minutes (i.e. wait).
Run the app again. Crash!
There is no easier way to reproduce the crash (nothing in onResume). As you can imagine, this is kind of hard to debug. In an ideal world, the OS (Android 5.0) would let me send a bug report to myself. The app is not published yet, so I don't see how I could get hold of the crash dump. Is it saved somewhere on the device?
I did try to debug the app from Developer Options, using the wait for debugger setting and then attaching to the process from within Android Studio. This, however, seems to make the bug go away. (The app is probably restarted.)
Q: How do I find the cause of the crash given these circumstances?
My intuition tells me that you are using some 'static' variables/fields in your application.
When your app goes to background and it is not used, system could drop process (because of memory management) of this application from memory. When you come back, Application object and all application proces in system is recreated, so all static variables are cleared/reinitialized.
Am i right?
Try looking into your logcat and if that is not an option for you. try some crash analytic like the following.
https://mint.splunk.com/
Integrate it in your app just with a single line and whenever your app get crashed you will receive a mail of your crash logs..
it will easily help you to determine your crash scenario..
And just out of curiosity are you using any singlton class in your Activity.?
I found the crash using adb as described here. Never realized that logcat keeps logs from previous executions. Nice!

Android development - Users updating app question

I've written a program that, when completed, I plan to add to the Android Marketplace. I have given many files as features for users to store information and reload later, and while debugging, I've noticed the files tend to get deleted when I update the code after a long while (like a few days spread apart--for some reason, it doesn't happen when I update the code often, like every hour when I'm adding new features and testing them out). Note that I use a real phone for testing and not the emulator. What I'm wondering is, will the files get deleted after each release of the app?
I really don't want users to lose their stored information on every update or bug fix I provide, so if that is the case, is there a way around this?
Nope the files doesn't get deleted automatically, but it depends upon where you are storing the files. If the user deletes the app the files associated with it will get deleted too. But in case of an upgrade, No! normally it won't.
In case you are using SQLite for storing data, there is a proper way to handle upgrade there.

How do I most easily delete Android application data upon upgrade/update?

So, I have found a bug in a specific sdk that causes it to fail on some Android phones after re-installing a new version of an app which uses the sdk (via adb install -r, and presumably when a user gets an update that has been pushed to the Android market). Is there any way to force an application's data to automatically be cleared upon update of the app? I realize there are different ways that data could be stored, but I just need to essentially simulate an invocation of the "Clear Data" button that'd you find when browsing to the application in the "Manage Applications" section of the Settings (i.e. I just want all data gone).
I am an Android noob and am doing minimal Java coding on this project, so I am basically looking for the simplest solution here. I suppose I could settle on storing a "currentVersion" to disk and then checking it upon launch every time to see if the real current version matches the version that was written to disk on the last launch. Is that the only real way to do this? If so, what's the simplest way to do so?
Thanks!
Is there any way to force an application's data to automatically be cleared upon update of the app?
No, at least for my definition of "automatic".
I suppose I could settle on storing a "currentVersion" to disk and then checking it upon launch every time to see if the real current version matches the version that was written to disk on the last launch. Is that the only real way to do this?
I'd name it lastKnownVersion, but otherwise this approach seems sound and probably is your only viable option.
If so, what's the simplest way to do so?
Ummm...do exactly what you said. Use Java I/O (storing the file somewhere inside of getFilesDir()), or SharedPreferences.
Bear in mind, though, that your users may get rather frustrated if you blow away their data on an app update. Personally, I'd rather we find a better solution to your original problem ("I have found a bug in a specific sdk that causes it to fail on some Android phones after re-installing a new version of an app which uses the sdk").

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