Android App Development for Motorola Devices

[jstatz]

This is basically a bug report, I'm not sure who to send this to...

I'm the developer of a number of Live Wallpapers on the Android Marketplace, one of which is approaching a quarter million downloads. With a number of additional handsets getting updated to Android 2.1 last week, I started getting a lot of e-mail from folks who have an Eris, Samsung Moment, etc about my wallpaper not working on their handset.  This, of course, is because that's an unsupported feature on those handsets.

I did a little investigation and realized there's a way to fix this and avoid all the confusion: When filling out your application manifest, you can list Live Wallpaper as a used feature.  This will allow the marketplace to filter out the listing if the phone doesn't have that feature.  The XML goes into the AndroidManifest.xml, and looks like so:

<uses-feature android:name="android.software.live_wallpaper" />

So, next time I did an update I included that in the manifest.  It seemed to work, I couldn't see the listing on my Eris.  The problem is, I couldn't see the listing on my Droid, either.  I double-checked the Manifest and confirmed that was the only change, and I know that it was (correctly) visible on other handsets (the Incredible, Nexus One, etc).  After rebooting the Droid a couple times, and waiting a day or so to confirm it wasn't ever going to show up, I did another update with the only change being the removal of the uses-feature flag.  Checking the marketplace a minute later on the Droid, the listing was visible again.

This strongly suggests to me that the Droid's 2.1 update failed to update this flag, as other 2.1 handsets appear to behave as expected.  So far there hasn't been much discussion of this issue, as almost everything running 2.1 supported Live Wallpapers, but with last week's update of the Eris and Moment it's going to matter a lot more that this flag be used correctly, otherwise there'll be a lot of user confusion.

Unfortunately, as the Droid as a sizeable percentage of the available market, I really don't want to make my products unavailable to Droid users.  It's bad for me and it's bad for them.  Leaving things as is will lead to some confusion and a lot of "this doesn't work" 1-star comments that aren't really correct, but my judgement currently is it'll be a price to pay for the time being.  It's also possible that there's a number of wallpapers on the market right now that are (properly) using this flag in their Manifest, that Droid users don't currently have access to.

Is there anywhere I can report this issue as an official bug?  Another discussion is on the Google Groups listing here: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/ca9374a3d 7b1c06b/ddf788b10aa...

[jstatz]

Anyone?  Anything I can do to get this addressed, I'll gladly do.

[Haris]

Hi

Thanks for bringing up the issue.

I will bring it to the notice of our platform engineering team for further investigation.

Thanks

SV

[jstatz]

Thank you very much sir.  I'd love to get this fixed, it really confuses people.

[StarBreaker]

Could I ask if there has been any update to this Major Issue brought up by Jstaz?

This is still happening on many phones and As developers this  issue stands to hurt us.  Getting bad reviews for a problem that is beyond out control is harsh. 

[jstatz]

Motorola has since fixed this problem on all their handsets that matter, so far as I can tell.  The current big offender is Samsung's entire Galaxy S line.

I brought this up with a contact on the Android side of things at Google, and they successfully got the issued pushed through to Samsung.  My understanding is that the filtering problem is fixed as of the 2.2 update for all Galaxy S phones.  Unfortunately they're not exactly being quick about getting that pushed out, especially for the Fascinate and Vibrant.

I'm also assured that sanity checking this flag is part of the Android certification test suite now, so we should gradually see the problem go away.

I've reintroduced the flag onto most of my lower sellers at this point, but don't want to handicap my best sellers until Samsung finishes updating their devices.  The Galaxy S has sold very well, so I'm guessing about 10% of the market gets lost due to the problem, currently.