App crashes on startup with v27.214

[albertlarsan68]

Since around a day, I need at least 10 tries in order to be able to read the messages on Zulip.
The version reported by the Settings on my phone is 27.214.
The app crashes on startup, I can try to get more information if you guide me on how to get them

[sevmonster]

Probably dupe of #5741

[albertlarsan68]

Maybe, but I'm on Android 13. I have a Samsung S20 FE, with One UI v5.1. It was fixed by going back to the stable version.

[gnprice]

Thanks @albertlarsan68 for the report. That is concerning. It's potentially the same issue as #5741, but also potentially the same as #5757.

Good to know that going back to v27.213 (that's the current stable version) fixed it.

Unfortunately the biggest change in v27.214 is one that we are required to make soon, by Google. So I will be very interested in teasing apart whether the crashes are brought on by that change, and if so then trying to identify what we can do to make that change without crashes.

Would you make an account on chat.zulip.org and say hello in the #mobile stream? That will be the best venue for debugging.

[gnprice]

Further context, from the data the Google Play Console gives us (with links for those with access):

We're seeing a number of crashes on v27.214. They look like the signature of a memory-corruption issue — they're all SIGSEGV and SIGABRT and SIGBUS, with a bunch of distinct stack traces (15 of them), across a number of different areas of native code.

These add up to a shockingly high crash rate of roughly 5-15% for beta users in the three days of data so far since we rolled out v27.214 to beta. (That's in the measure Google highlights: the daily "user-perceived crash rate", defined as "the percentage of your daily active users who experienced at least one user-perceived crash", meaning basically a crash in the foreground.)

By comparison our crash rate in July and August, before the emergence of #5757, was a bit under 0.3%. It rose in the last week of August, then spiked in mid-September; but since the rollout of v27.213, our crash rate for all users has been around 0.9-1.0% (same link). That leaves a sharp contrast with v27.214.

So @albertlarsan68 is very much not alone, and we can't roll out to users in general a version that has such a high rate of crashes. But I've been using the app regularly on my Android 13 device, and haven't seen the crash. So help from someone who is seeing it will be very useful in narrowing down the cause.

[gnprice]

Chat thread is here: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/48-mobile/topic/Android.20crash.20.23M5778/near/1659548

We made a v27.215 release and then a v27.216 release, both to alpha. Both of them stopped the crashes for @albertlarsan68.

• v27.215 was atop v27.213 but adds the targetSdkVersion 33 upgrade, #M5761.
• v27.216 was atop v27.214 (on main) but disables Sentry again on Android entirely, just like we did for v27.213.

I plan to send v27.216 to beta tomorrow. Hopefully that will bring the overall crash rate in beta back down to the same 0.9-1.0% we're seeing with v27.213.

[gnprice]

I plan to send v27.216 to beta tomorrow. Hopefully that will bring the overall crash rate in beta back down

Indeed, thankfully, it did, and I've now sent that version to all users.

Thanks again @albertlarsan68 for the report! Very glad that we didn't send 214 to production.