Android app crashing

Owned by Stefan Prelle, created
Last updated: Jul 26, 2023
2 min read

Mobile support for Commlink is experimental and very hard to debug, if you are not an Android developer. It may be that we are not able to fix a problem.

 Problem

The android application crashes - either directly when starting or when performing specific tasks, like exporting to PDF

 Possible cause

Commlink is a desktop application that has been converted using a rather new software (GraalVM, not from us) to an Android application. While that generally works, they process is highly complex and has 3 major sources for problems

  1. GraalVM+Gluon build tools produces code not compatible with some vendors Android versions
    We only do test against plain Android versions from Google.

  2. We made use of features not supported (by the converter) on all Android devices
    For example rendering PDFs requires code that GraalVM is not compatible with.

  3. We forgot to include required definitions for the conversion process
    That one is fixable.

What we need

When you file a bug report, there are two kinds of logfiles that could help us find the reason for this problem.

Android logs

The Android system log is the most interesting source of debugging such errors. Unfortunately it is the hardest to get your hands on. Basically you need the Android developer tools (namely the Tool adb ), activated developer settings on your Android device and some kind of configured log connection (mostly USB).

If you are familiar with debugging Android devices (or willing to Google how to get there), a logcat excerpt of the crash would be great.

Commlink logs

Your logfile should be at Documents/CommLink6/logs/logfile.txt - other logfiles can be ignored.

First step of diagnosis would be to see, if your logdirectory (see above) exists.
If not, the problem is that for some reason Android cannot start Commlink at all.
If yes, delete the logfile (see above) and try again. The logfile should be recreated. If not, the problem is more with Android, not Commlink.
If Commlink still does not start, the reason for the crash is Commlink itself. With the help of the logfile we may be able to spot the problem.
If Commlink starts after you deleted the log directory, it means that for some reason there was a permission problem with the file. This shouldn’t happen and is potentially a problem we may never be able to fix.
The workaround would be to always delete the log directory if CommLink doesn’t start after an update/reinstall.

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