I finally succeeded in releasing the Focus WTV Live app for Android TV. The biggest hurdle was getting through the Play store approval process. Rejections without any clue about what was going wrong. It doesn’t help that Google has disabled the Pre-launch report, running your new build on various hardware, surfacing problems you would otherwise never find out. I suspect Google has disabled pre-launch report in favor of AI payloads. 😉
So when you do encounter such a problem, without the pre-launch report combined with useless rejection feedback, you’re really in the dark. Well, I did figure it out after all, but it took lots of effort and adding crashlytics reporting which otherwise would not have been needed. It turned out to be a video player issue on low-end (read: crappy) hardware. Oh well, all’s well that ends well..
10 years ago, I cancelled my cable TV subscription and switched to internet streaming-only using the first Android TV device, Google’s Nexus Player. It was a great cost saver. I never watched live TV to begin with, as I always wanted to skip forward during ads. My new home was Netflix and having no ads was a breath of fresh air.
In the beginning, I would miss some Belgian content here and there, but by now, every major Belgian TV channel has a free app streaming live TV and on-demand content (with paid options to reduce ads or watch additional content).
My parents barely watch TV except for the news, so I suggested to make some savings and cancel their overpriced Telenet cable TV subscription. It turns out there’s only 1 problem: they like to watch the regional news channel WTV from time to time.
Streaming WTV to an Android TV device, what are the available options?
Android TV app: the Focus/WTV app is not available for Android TV.
Cast from phone: casting a stream from the Android app on your phone is not supported.
Cast from website: casting from the website is supported, but the stream hangs after a few seconds and refuses to resume.
Ideally, my parents can just use an app on the TV, it makes things less complicated.
So, what is the solution? Create a new app! 😉
A few years ago, I gave it a first try, but somehow did not succeed. Maybe I was trying to support login and on-demand content. Yesterday, I lowered the bar and thought just streaming live content would already be sufficient (it’s what my parents do now).
To my surprise, I quite quickly had a working proof of concept. I was still using the project I created a few years ago using an old flutter version. So I upgraded the flutter version and it no longer worked on my Nvidia Shield TV, but it still worked on the emulator. It does not render video anymore, only audio. I also tried out the latest flutter 3.29.2, and even though I do get image again, it’s all red. Long story short: don’t use impeller yet for hardware-acceleration sensitive stuff like video streaming.
I would show a screenshot, but there’s nothing to see but the live stream. 🙂
Maintenance update to stay compliant with Google Play store.
Although functionally, nothing changed, a lot has changed under the hood, so let me know if you experience any problems.
Rant
You may have noticed a lot of updates flying by last week. Over the past few months a ton of policy violations accumulated. I postponed updating the app since I am redeveloping the app from scratch and wanted to avoid going through the whole mess of getting the app compliant and approved, basically investing time in an app that will be deprecated soon.
However, I realized that rebuilding the app would take longer than expected (after all, it is an accumulation of work over 10 years) and that it would put too much pressure on me to deliver the app soon. If I didn’t take any action, the current app would have been removed from the app store last weekend, so I decided it is better to make the app compliant and provide continuity. It took me a whole week, each day putting in hours after work, to get the app approved.
As any developer will confirm, an app store approval can be a huge struggle. Even when you fix everything, your app still gets rejected. I noticed a bug in the review process in which they give feedback for an older version of the app. They claimed I repeatedly asked for permission even if the user granted permission. I fixed the bug, but they kept rejecting for the same reason. I filed an appeal asking for clarification, they responded the exact same thing (so appeal was basically useless). Some policy fixes need several days to be picked up and acknowledged by Play store. It only seemed to move forward after these policy fixes “trickled through”. I had so many fixes to do, from changing to app bundles, changing signing, upgrading to allowed versions of billing/analytics, upgrading android target, etc that it seems the review system choked on it..
The annoying thing was: I accidentically omitted a commit for some release but that’s when the review process got into the rejection loop. A few 1000 users were experiencing a crash and the fix was ready to release, but google would fail to accept it, even though it got accepted the day before! 🙄 These days, this has a snow ball effect: because they notice my app crashes more than its peers in the same category (Utilities), Google decides it should bury your app deeper in search results, lol.
Here’s the screenshot, for your entertainment:
So, the funny thing is they caused this problem themselves and even now when the bug is fixed, it will take some time until the average crash rate is low enough and Google reinstates my reputation.
Also, for anyone struggling with rejection with the notice “Your icon does not fill the entire icon space.”: you have to specify a 512×512 icon resource, just for TV, which does not have a transparent background. But be sure that the foreground stays within the allowed bounds! Life saver 😉
Anyway, that’s it for today. I know the current app is in a bit of broken state: the overlay is blocking input on certain screens, the service is being killed after some random time (google deployed a policy change end of 2023, before that no problem).
So rebuilding the app should fix all these things 🤞 AND make it easier to add new features. 🎉
After a nice long beta period of 4 months (I forgot about it 🫢), 0.2.11 has been promoted to production. Highlight is the eternal loading state bug fix. On the technical side, I migrated crashlytics from Sentry to Firebase. You can disable reporting in the settings.
Changes since 0.2.7:
0.2.11 - 2023-03-26
===================
* fix eternal loading state + various bugfixes
* disable mark all as read button during loading
* replaced SentryLog by Firebase crashlytics
* center implicit refresh indicator + bigger text
* bump min sdk to 21 (firebase dep -> multidex)
Just in case you wonder about the changes since 0.2.5:
0.2.7 - 2023-01-25 ================== * fix utf8 html decode for titles * fix padding on progress indicator
0.2.6 - 2023-01-22 ================== + added setting: open in external browser
Soooo.. it’s been a while and although a lot of work was put into this new release, from an end-user point of view, this is merely just another “maintenance release”.
What happened?
You may know it is not easy to build apps that display stuff on top of everything, even if it is for a good reason. I tried to fix it, work around it, but I officially give up. Google is not bringing back the overlay permission. Nevertheless, using developer tools it is still possible, albeit totally user unfriendly. In theory, there is still another loop hole left, using accessibility features, but it’s only a matter of time before your app gets delisted.
Which segued nicely to the next cause of delay: the app got delisted because google does not like me linking to a donation page from the app. You would think removing this link is a small change. Android development is a moving target, so no, nothing is “simple”. 😉 Releasing a new version often requires updating other parts of the app because of google increasing the minimum android version constraint. In this case, there were so many changes (also in ads, support libs, etc), even for a little app, it was a nightmare. Anyway, after a few beta releases, it got sorted out.
In the meanwhile, I was trying to fix the overlay permission problem: my strategy ranged from asking nice to google, to implementing workarounds, to creating a companion app, to decompiling other apps.. Today, I decided I have to accept there is no acceptable solution and just provide technical documentation on how to give the permission using a developer tool which, by definition, is user unfriendly. It is a sad solution, but better than nothing! Apologies for taking 3 years to come to this conclusion. 🙂
The documentation link will show up as a QR code when you encounter the permission problem. You can also open it from within the app. Later on I hope to have an instruction video. Lastly, for rooted devices, you can simply press the button and it solves the problem magically. 😉
What’s next?
Over the years, I collected quite some feature request. More recently, it seems TCL has released some TV sets which do not properly redraw the clock. It seems to be a bug but I will see what I can do there. I provided a tweak flag in the settings to try out certain workarounds. Let the experimenting begin! 😉
v0.7.0 2021-01-29
=================
+ overlay permission: QR code to guide on how to grant the permission
+ overlay permission: on rooted devices you can now grant the permission with the simple press of a button
* preview color before accepting
* fix crash opening website on TV device that does not advertise itself as TV
* fix crash on some devices when moving/resizing the clock
* changing 12/24 hour format, notify state change no longer requires clockview recreation
* cleanup pref change code and prevent clockview NPE
* workaround pref: TCL devices
* admob upgrade
+ firebase analytics (can be disabled)
* bumped min SDK level to 17 (Jelly Bean 4.2.x)
* target android sdk 30
technology is there to help you, and in theory it can do lots of cool stuff to make your life more comfortable, yet it only seems to cause more frustation.
Yesterday I felt exactly in this spot 🙂 Let me paint some context.
A few years ago I moved into a new place and didn’t immediately find a spot for my radio. I bought this radio when I was 14 years old with just about all my savings. You have to imagine: a cool radio in that era had to be bulky and excessive wrt tweaking nobs and bass sounds etc. Problem with this is that it consumes quite some valuable living room space. Even more, in the last few years I didn’t often listen anymore to air-broadcasted radio. Nowadays it’s all about on-demand internet streaming, right? 😉 But I also listened less and less to radio channels in general. There is one exception though: I turned into a loyal Klara listener. (Tastes can change!) You can hardly call it a “classical” radio station though 😉 There’s no screaming at you or ads interrupting every 10 mins.. Very peaceful indeed. Anyway..
Without a physical radio in my living room, the ideal workflow to start listening is as follows:
Open radio app on my tablet
Cast to TV
However, the real-world workflow is more like this:
Turn on my android tablet. Wait up until 1 minute until it has “warmed up”. This has everything to do with Android becoming so bloated Google had to introduce the Doze feature which basically makes your device useless unless under active use (read that again 😉 ). This guy summarizes the Doze matter quite nicely.
Open my radio app (good app unless you use Android Pie)
Wait for the ad to materialize, otherwise playback stops. Same goes for syncing of mail accounts which kicks off due to awesome Doze feature.
Open the desired radio channel and press play button
Wait for the stream to start playing.
Google cast the stream to my Android TV (Nexus Player connected to “regular” smart tv)
Wait for my tv to automatically turn on using HDMI CEC.
Check whether the android TV responds to the cast call. Several possibilities here:
the TV fails to turn on -> turn on manually
the TV turned on but forgot why (cast does not start)
Realize it is broken again, and cast again from the tablet.
You see it’s working now and starting doing other stuff, only to realize a few minutes that the stream stopped! This can be anything: from the tablet sync somehow interfering in the playback on the TV to internet connection problems to the TV restarting services (but not resuming) because it deems it needs more memory.
Although my television has sub par sound quality, it highly exceeds the fidelity of my tablet or phone. 😉 It does however consume quite some power: ~120W (off the top of my head). Luckily I can fix this with a few extra button presses. So the final steps in the workflow are:
use TV remote to open menu (where you can configure brightness etc)
go into first menu “Picture”
navigate to bottom of list (luckily you can go up to end up at the bottom)
select “Picture off” and press OK
Only consumes about 20W then, which seems acceptable to me.
Conclusion: while listening to the radio should be only a few clicks/touches away, it literally takes minutes to set up.
Mind you, this is only turning on, not turning off! You might think: is that even a thing? You just “turn it off”? That would be to easy in today’s technologically advanced world!
Option 1: turn off the TV. Simple right? Problem is that does not stop the audio stream. Since I still live in a country where bandwidth is not unlimited, this is not an option.
Option 2: use android tv remote to exit cast (press home button a few times), then turn off TV. Problem is: sometimes the tablet will think the TV temporarily went missing and will start the cast again. (without you knowing, because you turned off the TV 😉 )
Option 3: the solution is to disconnect the cast on the tablet (sometimes it lost connection to the TV by itself) and then proceed with option 2. To be fair: successfully disconnecting the cast should stop the cast on the receiver (TV) too, so it saves time in option 2. However, disconnecting is cumbersome, it is not the same as simply pressing the stop icon in the notification (which merely pauses the cast on the receiving device)!
Anyway, this is a (quite elaborate) rant on why casting sucks. I feel sorry for ranting so much but after all, it is the tag line of this blog! 😛 So now, let’s cut to the chase!
Yesterday morning (when you don’t have much time), I was exactly in that spot again and decided to do something about it. First I checked my app updates (android TV updates when it feels like updating). Lo and behold: there was a google cast update! For a minute there, I had hope. I installed the update and checked: nah, although the changelog told me “bugs were fixed”, of course, not this bug. 😉
Reducing the number of dependencies seems the obvious solution: the less components are involved, the less can go wrong! In this case a native Android TV radio app could ease the pain but neither general radio apps nor specific Klara apps are available. In a peak moment of frustration I thought to myself: I will create an app this evening myself! Of course I’ve had this thought before, but anyone who has created an app knows that the effort can highly exceed the enjoyment, especially when you decide to share your app with the rest of the world because you feel any good compassionate person would do that.
But this app seemed so simple I thought: it can’t go wrong. 😉 In any case, I’ll keep it to myself until I feel it can more or less defend itself against the judgemental tsunami the internet can be.
Though, without further ado, here is a small demo.
It’s so basic I almost feel embarressed about it. 😉
The plan is to make a fast minimalistic app:
Only live stream (+ continuo maybe later)
Only foreground. You can stop playback by exiting the app.
Temporary pause (for a few seconds): answer a phone call and resume the radio where you left off
Several users have brought to my attention that the clock app no longer works after a device factory reset due to a permission problem. The dreaded message appears:
Unfortunately, your device’s rom does not support a user interface for granting the overlay permission :/
These are my findings so far:
Not brand or model specific problem When I received the first report, I uninstalled the app on my Nexus Player (Oreo) and reinstalled it and guess what: same problem. In the meantime I received reports on Sony TV and Nvidia Shield TV.
Android TV Marshmallow and higher
Yes, all trouble started with Marshmallow. 😉 I received reports on Nougat and Oreo and tested the app also on a Nexus 7 tablet (KitKat) and Pie phone. Unsurprisingly on KitKat no problem since no permissions exist yet, on Pie my phone showed a permission dialog to grant the permission (which is good, but still abnormal).
Unfortunately, I have not encountered an Android TV rom yet which provides a user interface for granting the overlay permission (it’s not in stock android TV and none of the vendors seem to care).
Fresh installs All reports were due to device resets, but as I already pointed out: simply uninstalling and reinstalling the clock app will exhibit the problem. Updating the app is no problem since it will preserve the previously granted permission. By taking advantage of this, I can test out a fix without impacting existing users.
I did a quick search on the interwebs but no luck so far, it’s kind of a niche topic after all. 😉 I suspect a google Play Services or Play store update is the culprit but didn’t find any news yet. If it’s part of a security fix, information will be sparse anyhow.
I see several options:
google did a small fuckup in the play services or store (as they did with the remote not responding, deep sleeping) and might fix it (can take several months)
google intentionally changed the way the overlay permission is granted (and no longer wants to grant it automagically)
the permission not being granted anymore might be a side effect of some other policy change
Overlay permissions have always been tricky on android (tv), so let’s hope there is a solution possible.. (or a hack at least)
