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Sunday, 21 July 2013

Fractor (non-)update

Fractor was released on the Android Play Store two months ago, and in that time it has been installed by a plethora of adventurous users. Unfortunately, one mischievous bug which prevents Fractor from starting has appeared for a few specific phones. I haven't spotted a pattern in hardware or Android OS version where Fractor does not work.

When an Android app crashes the user has the option of reporting the error, which sends a stack trace and optional message to the developer. From these reports I suspect a fault in the initialisation of OpenGL. However, this isn't enough for me to solve the problem. I really need to recreate the fault myself, but Fractor does not demonstrate the problem in the Android emulator or in any of the phones I have access to. I guess this is why services that do Android testing on dozens of devices exist, even in the cloud!