Air for Android: Black Screen after device-alarm

Question

I do have a problem and have very little to go on. I'm about to release an App (created with Air for Android As3) on the Samsung App Store and just got a list of issues that have to be resolved after the app has been tested by samsung staff before the app could be released.

I did manage to solve almost all of the issues, but 1 very important one is beyond me. They say the screen turns/stays black, when returning after the device alarm interrupted the app. This issue practivally happend on all their devices, including a group including the phones I own (e.g. Galaxy S3).

I do have "OnDeActivate" and "OnActivate" listeners in place that are there to pause the app, disable sound etc. if it loses focus, gets minimized etc., yet I checked on my devices and I can't reproduce this error. Meaning if the app gets interrupted on my device by the alarm, I can resume it without any problems. no black screens.

So the question is: Is there any way for me to fix that at all? I do have to work within AirForAndroid AS3 so I guess possibilities are limited. Any clues where I can look? Any listeners to set, or is there a way to maybe "force" the app to reinitialize or refresh the display? Or to listen for the system alarm? Help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Good news, the dirty fix of toggling the stage quality seems to have worked for Samsung, it has not shown up in their latest certification report of my app.

by the way, this is not for a stage3D app, that's different It's for a GPU app

Answer 2

When the app loses focus on Android (goes into background) it will lose the context, which among other things mean that you lose all the created graphics, cached objects and like.

You didn't specify what kind of app it is. If you're using Stage3D, that means you'll have to recreate all your textures, and if you're on plain old displaylist, you'll have to recreate any bitmaps that were created at runtime, and redraw your screen at least once (so the vector graphics get redrawn too).

Now, if you're using Starling, for example, it can take care of recreating context for you (there's a flag for enabling that), although you'll still have to recreate dynamically created bitmaps.

Answer 3

I am trying to overcome the same issue, I read somewhere that setting the stage quality to something else on both the activate and deactivate events might solve the issue.

So just set your stage quality to medium or whatever different in the deactivate and set it back to what it needs to be in the activate.

This should make AIR snap out of that black screen for the alarm (I hope)

An app of mine is with this fix is currently undergoing testing on the Samsung App Store. I hope it fixes it.