Mark, Apps are predictable state machines, your hair is an unpredictable chaos engine :).
The error is easily reproducible and so should be easily tracked, yet the developer of the most popular android app is showing that you don't need ship quality products in order to get the top spot, which is a dangerous precedent to set. Al. P.S. Interesting ideas, lets keep them coming so we can see if there is something we get implemented. --- * Written an Android App? - List it at http://andappstore.com/ * ====== Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's subsidiaries. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Murphy Sent: 12 April 2009 13:42 To: [email protected] Subject: [android-discuss] Re: G1 failing miserably.. Al Sutton wrote: > My concern is that the the Camera is a "built-in" app, Weather channel > app is *the* number #1 app in terms of popularity in Market, and snake > is the number #5 game by popularity, and all three throw up errors > like this which will make the *average user* feel that Android is > flaky by association. That assumes the average user is seeing these errors. I feel like a broken record, but one or two data points, out of a set of a million-plus devices, does not make a pattern. They aren't a good sign, but they aren't evidence of Armageddon, either. Ideally, apps should never fail. By the same token, ideally, I should have hair. > Do we name and shame > apps to try and get them improved? One entertaining-yet-probably-controversial way to do this would be to bake into Android a top-level exception handler that, in addition to providing better error messages, attempts to push the identity of the app and the exception stack trace to a Web service. Said Web service, perhaps running on App Engine, would make the information available to the application author...and anyone else. Average users would not find the information meaningful. Those interested in a name-and-shame approach, though, could create their own site to roll up the data to more average-user-friendly details. This won't work for all situations (e.g., crash while in airplane mode), but it might work for enough. > Do we look at improving the OS to > deal with situations like this in a better manner that doesn't require > users to be shown error messages they may not understand? The "deal with situations like this in a better manner" side is beyond my pay grade. Better error messages might be useful. Even if the automatic post-the-exception stuff I list above is deemed too intrusive, it would be helpful if Android had a send-the-crash-info button to do it more manually. Developers can put that in their own apps, but if you want it across the board, it's better to have it in the OS, IMHO. > or do we > carry on with the current system where we expect users to educate > themselves to deal with problems like this? > > To me the last one isn't part of the path to success. Indubitably. Here are some other not-mutually-exclusive options: -- Better educate developers on proper patterns for this sort of thing -- Better frameworks to help lead developers in the right direction for this sort of thing -- If people have figure out a way to get at the error log from application code on the device (and I forget if someone has a trick for that), it should be possible to create an AlarmManager-triggered app that scans for errors and publishes them to a Web service without having to modify the OS or instrument every app. We'd need to encourage users to install it, and power users might, giving us access to some level of crash details. -- Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy) http://commonsware.com | http://twitter.com/commonsguy Android App Developer Books: http://commonsware.com/books.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" 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-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
