As far as I know, this is related to copy protection and a bug in
devices running Android 1.5.
If you published your app with copy protection enabled, and
subsequently disable it in some future update, you will likely
experience this problem. Users who have Android 1.5 devices and had
your app installed before the update where copy protection was removed
will likely have it crash after they update to the unprotected app.
Something in the update process breaks the app, I expect references,
or ID addresses or something along those lines. This would result in
undefined behaviour in your app, most likely a crash on startup, but
if you get lucky and the app runs, it will almost certainly crash
somewhere else, seemingly at random.
However, if a 1.5 user uninstalls and reinstalls, the update process
is skipped and a fresh copy is installed, without broken references.
1.5 users who install your app for the first time would not have
problems either. As far as I am aware, this bug has been fixed in
Android 1.6 and later, which explains why only a smaller subset of
your users experience the problem.
I expect this issue might crop up more now that Google released their
new licensing scheme, and devs start switching over to that and
disable copy protection.
(As an aside, it is probably not wise to cheese of the Google devs on
a forum where you are asking for their help :)
On Aug 25, 12:40 am, TreKing <treking...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm curious to see how many of you are seeing this issue. I've looked
> through the group, on b.andriod.com and the Market "Help" Forum and not
> found anything related.
>
> I released an update to my app over the weekend and have since fielded a ton
> of emails that ultimately result in the same conclusion - the update process
> breaks the app for a small set of users. When I instruct them to uninstall
> and reinstall the app, everything works perfectly as expected. This has been
> the case EVERY SINGLE TIME (just got two more confirmations that this fixed
> their problems as I was writing this).
>
> The symptoms are generally the same: random force closes either on start up
> or in other areas of the app after the user updates the app from the Market.
> One time the issue was that the app would apparently no longer connect to
> the internet, again fixed by uninstall->reinstall. This seems to
> predominantly effect the paid version of the app, though it happens to the
> free one as well.
>
> Some people have sent reports to the Dev Console but some don't make sense
> (like a NullPointer for something I'm fairly positive is always set) and
> this one that seems impossible:
>
> java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.google.android.maps.GeoPoint
>
> That's right - my app, which requires the Google Maps addon and should not
> be allowed to install on devices without it, apparently crashed for someone
> because it could not find a maps library class. What the .. ?
>
> This is not the first time this has happened - it always occurs to a few
> people after each update. In fact I've been showing a dialog on update that
> specifically tells users to try to reinstall if they're having issues for
> this reason, so the problem is probably more widespread but I'm not hearing
> about it. But this time it's gotten fairly ridiculous. This might be a
> symptom of a larger user base since the last update was over two months ago,
> or it's an indication the problem is getting worse, I'm not sure.
>
> The fact that an uninstall->reinstall always fixes the problem is a pretty
> clear indication that there's a problem with the update process. Something
> along the lines is apparently botching the APK somehow.
>
> So are other people experiencing the same problem? Given the number of "new
> update force closes" comments I see on other apps, I'm assuming I'm not
> alone here.
>
> Any one know if this is an issue with the Android system itself or the
> offense to software engineering known as the Android Market that's at fault?
> I wouldn't be surprised if it's the Market since I redeploy ("update") the
> app constantly while developing and never run into this kind of issue - it's
> only users updating from the Market that have a problem.
>
> Any ideas on what is going wrong and / or what to do to fix or otherwise
> work around this issue?
>
> I've been fortunate so far that this has only resulted in one 1-Star "New
> update sucks, force closes" comment in each version (I've been training my
> users that's not a good way to get help) but am now cringing at the thought
> of having to deal with this at an increasing scale each and every time I
> update (which is about once a month, usually).
>
> There has to be something I can do about this. Thoughts?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------------
> TreKing <http://sites.google.com/site/rezmobileapps/treking> - Chicago
> transit tracking app for Android-powered devices
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