Hi all, I have an app in the Market, BBC News, which has really taken off much to my delight. Unfortunately however having 175,000+ users means that when I put out an update, any bugs with it can break thousands of user's installs even if the bug only affects 1% of users.
At the weekend I updated BBC News with an update I'd been working on for about two months. Previously the app downloaded and displayed the headlines on demand which meant you always needed a working internet connection. The update added a local database so articles were cached. Combined with pre-caching the app seems faster and much more resilient to flaky connections (i.e. real life connections). That's if it worked. Shortly after the update I got a lot of email from HTC Hero users saying the app had stopped working. I have a Hero but couldn't recreate. I added a diagnostics-by-email feature, and sent replies to some users with a test version. Because the app does a lot of background loading which it needs to suddenly interrupt for users' requests, I have had to tweak the network settings somewhat. It seems that lowering the connection timeout to one second was fatal. It seems some phones can rarely connect in under a second. The Hero is particularly badly affected but it is dependent on a number of factors including local radio conditions. Yesterday I put out an update that put the timeout back to the default. The reports from Hero users stop abruptly. However after a few hours my inbox is lit up with reports from Droid/Milestone users. These users report being stuck on the loading screen, messages indicating the download queue is stuck. This stuck queue problem is what led me to experiment with timeout settings to begin with. Anyway I would really appreciate it if people who have either of these handsets (or indeed any handset) could try out an experimental version v. 2.1.10 on my website at http://jimblackler.net/NewsWidget.apk This has a compromise 5 second timeout (urlConnection.setConnectTimeout(5000) .. urlConnection.setReadTimeout(5000)) and I hope that this setting works well on Hero and Droid/Milestone. I would really like to make my next Market push reliable and not cause problems for my app's users. JIm -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
