I’ve been receiving odd reports for the last few weeks that some fold and flip devices, specifically the new Samsung ones, are crashing immediately when opening Sober Time. It seems to also affect some tablets.
It’s been a tricky one to investigate since I don’t actually own any of these devices. Samsung helped out by setting up a remote test lab that I could use to emulate their new devices.
After a lot of development, research and testing, I found the issue and it has now been resolved with the latest version of Sober Time (4.0.60). I’ve just submitted it to the Google Play Store, and it should take a few days to go live.
Update: While the new version has been submitted to Google Play, it is stuck in the review process. I don’t have any update from Google yet and I’m waiting for them to get back to me so that I can publish this.
I felt it only fair that I should include additional detail. This bug was hard to identify, but I found the issue and fixed it. Then I submitted the update on the 4th of September:
Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble with Google Play’s review team. They have rejected the update several times now due to our community’s features not being compliant. This update didn’t add or change anything about the community.
The things they said are non-compliant are things that Talking Sober does have. For example: they said the community needs a way to flag posts. Talking Sober has that. There are a few of these “issues” that they mentioned, so I made an entire Google Drive folder with documents, screenshots and videos explaining each and every one of these issues and how Talking Sober does actually have the required capabilities.
It’s also apparent that the review process is outsourced and not done directly by Google.
I appealed the rejection, with the Google Drive folder as reference. Appeals are handled directly by Google and not the outsourced company. Google reviewed the appeal and accepted it, saying the app is ready to be published. I sent in the app again, and it was again rejected by the outsourced company for the same reasons. I then appealed again, and Google again accepted it, again telling me it was ready to publish. I sent it in again, and now I’m waiting on the outsourced company to review it.
This has been frustrating, to say the least, especially since none of these issues are even accurate. We are fully compliant. I’m just hoping that they can understand and approve the update so the crashes can stop.
Sounds like that outsourced review team are drunk or something…
Thank you for your efforts in all this - so much additional unnecessary work has been required of you and I appreciate your thoroughness, patience and attention to detail.
Update 4: Google and the review team have finally accepted the app update. It is now being published to all users. If nothing goes wrong, everyone should have 4.0.60 available to them within the next few hours.
I will add on Robin’s behalf. This was indeed going on for weeks. We as moderators could see some of the testing going on in the background by the reviewers to get approval, and Robin trying very hard to be patient through a pretty flawed process.
Which… As the mods… Hearing we stuff like we don’t have a flagging process or moderators… Uh… Was pretty frustrating just to watch. Everything they said we don’t have we very obviously do.
Thank you, Robin! Glad that’s finally taken care of.
