Question

My app has a splash screen activity and that starts an intent for the main activity which has an openGL view in it.

Some users are reporting that the game exits and goes back to the splash.

I’m certain that it’s a bug, but it’s failing silently and so I don’t get any crash reports back.

What can cause it to fail silently like this? in such a way that the app cycles and no Force Close window is seen by the user.

Edit: I have stoped the splash screen restarting by putting noHistory=”true” in the manifest for the slapsh activity. Now users just report that it exits silently. What would cause that?!

Edit2: If it’s any clue, I recently updated from SDK r10 to SDK r16, I believe I have removed all other changes, I’d go back to r10 if I could, but I can’t find a way.

Edit Jan 19: I have found the underlying cause of this problem. At some point google introduced to the SDK a feature called “png crush”. And PowerVR is not always happy loading those textures. See my other question here for more info and solution.

Answer 1

It does happen to my applications as well, quite often during development-debug and it is usually due to the following problem.

• The GPU goes in an out of memory status since there is too much memory allocated using VBOs. This usually depends on the fact not always the VBOs are deallocated correctly. When it does happen, in my humble experience, is like if the virtual machine hosting your application dies. Ufortunately it is evident that you cannot check the logcat of your users.

The problem is very variable since it depends on the GPU type and on the memory available to the GPU.
For instance on my galaxy tab, it happens after (in terms of loaded levels and therefore VBOs) my basic Motorola Defy.

This creates a lot of troubles in the troubleshooting.

🙂