Activity won't render randomly, shows only white screen on Samsung

Question

So, I acknowledge that this is a truly vague question. What happens is that very randomly and rarely on only Samsung devices (2x S3 and 1xS4 mini) the starting activity (basically any activity, I have not found common ground) won't render and shows only a white screen. The funny thing is that actually the views are there, I can click the white screen and when I hit the correct spots, I can open dialogs using buttons, and go to the next activities. What is more weird is the fact that when the next activity opens using an animation, I can see the activity for a fraction of a second.

So, has anyone ever seen or experienced this?

Note: As this is such a random bug, I would need to copy the whole project here for code samples and I just cannot do that.

Answer 1

It is known to Google that there is a problem with appcompat on various devices, such as

(~100 users):
- 50% Enspert (Rainbow, likely the Wiko model #8 mentioned)
- 30% Samsung (SM G3815, SM G730A, SM T217A, GT S7275B, GT S7275R)
- 10% MyPhone (Agua Rio)

The thread says (on Feb 8th)

This is potentially 'fixed' by an AOSP commit which will be in the next release: https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/198301/

See also the github issue where it is said

Various Samsung phones are including older versions of the android support library in the framework or classpath.

For a possible workaround, see appcompat-v7 v21.0.0 causing crash on Samsung devices with Android v4.2.2, where the proposed solutions are

using

-keep class !android.support.v7.internal.view.menu.**,android.support.v7.** {*;}

and

The better solution is add the following lines instead:

-keep class !android.support.v7.internal.view.menu.MenuBuilder, !android.support.v7.internal.view.menu.SubMenuBuilder, android.support.v7.** { *; }
-keep interface android.support.v7.** { *; }

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Update: seems like it's fixed in the android 7.0 appcompat library (SDK 24.0)

According to the last posts of the bug-report, this should be fixed on the new version of the support library (24) : https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=78377#c374

Someone even claimed it fixed it.