LDS Music (Android) crashing at startup

I believe this may be connected to my recent upgrade to Android 6.0.1.

You may want to try un-install and re-install. Sometimes in-place upgrades don't work well. The app may do things differently if it senses it's being installed on 6.

russellhltn wrote:You may want to try un-install and re-install. Sometimes in-place upgrades don't work well. The app may do things differently if it senses it's being installed on 6.

Thanks for the suggestion. I just uninstalled and reinstalled and found the same crashing behavior persists. Now that I'm at home, I dug into it a little further: it looks like getNewestCatalogVersion() is throwing a null pointer exception (ldsmusic.api.sync) I've attached the stack trace for the dev team.

Thanks

I'm also getting this error, and have not upgraded the OS (Android 5.0). LDS Music version is 1.1.0. Have power-cycled the phone, but it still does it. My tablet (Android 4.4.2) also does it. I think the latest update has something broken. I did send a crash report.

lmcguire wrote:I did send a crash report.

As did I this morning. Android 5.0.1. LDS Music 1.1.0. I don't remember seeing a new version of LDS Music come doen recently. I must have been sleeping.

I actually had to use a piano to pitch a hymn at Church today.

lajackson wrote:I actually had to use a piano to pitch a hymn at Church today.

A piano?!

I had the same behavior, that I just noticed yesterday on my Moto X. I tried to fix by reinstalling the app, and cycling my phone. Problem persists.

After experiencing the same thing, uninstalling and reinstalling, I looked at the Reviews for this app in Google Play and it appears to be a widespread issue. https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... s.ldsmusic

Does anyone know who maintains the LDS Music App? I always assumed the church employed professional developers for their apps, but perhaps they utilize more of a volunteer model? If it is volunteer driven, how do I get access to the source and commit rights to fix the bug? Usually null pointer exceptions are easy to track down and fix (especially when they're readily reproducible). Even if the fix isn't trivial, someone should roll back the breaking changes and republish a version that works until a proper fix is in place and tested.

tysonjg wrote:I always assumed the church employed professional developers for their apps, but perhaps they utilize more of a volunteer model?

Most of the app projects are a mix of some employee resources and some volunteer. You can join the LDS Music Android project by visiting the project page: https://tech.lds.org/projects?controlle ... jectid=116

just received a reply from android support at ldsmail.net

"Android Music is crashing because we lost a server over the weekend. It should be fixed today. In the meantime, you should be able to use LDS Music if you set your phone to "airplane mode" before opening. It is a pain, but it works...
The developer for this app is in training all week."


This seems to work, if you get out of airplane mode, after the app is up and running

The Church employs a small number of professional developers for Android and iOS. They work on projects according to priorities established by overseeing departments and general authorities. The LDS Music app has not been set as a priority, when balanced with the other apps, so there isn't any developer specifically assigned to it; however, if there is a major bug, usually one or two developers are able to work on it to fix the bug.

In this case, one of the Church servers is down, which hosted some of the music MP3s, which is causing the Android app to crash (the iOS app is also unable to access the MP3s, but it doesn't crash). The Android developers fixed the app this morning so at least it won't crash, and will be pushing out a beta version this morning to make sure there aren't any other bugs, before releasing publicly.

There will probably also be new content pushed, and/or an update to LDS Music for iOS, to fix the server problem with MP3s – hopefully sooner rather than later.

The server with MP3s is back up, so the problem should be fixed for both Android and iOS. The Android update is still on its way, to make sure that a server being down won't cause a crash again.

I can confirm the app is no longer crashing with the server online.

Thank you!