Phonegap (Android Build) - Intermediate Screen before Splash Screen

Question

When I first launched my app, built using build.phonegap.com and then distributed to my Nexus 7 (running Jelly Bean 4.3), I see a black screen with a gray title bar at the top. Is this normal, or is there a setting I need to enable/disable? I can say that this build was a debug build (I don't know why, but when I checked again the setting was checked).

I'll be glad to provide any insights needed to help, thanks! I can also link the github repo that houses my code if that is helpful.

There's an image:

EDIT2: This also happens after clearing the app from the apps running the in background.

Answer 1

Does your app eventually show or does it just stay blank? Cant really tell what is going on but a quick something came to mind. Are you using a splash screen? Take a look at the config.xml docs at the section about splash screen duration (Android only). The docs can be found here.

Splash Screen Duration

• splash-screen-duration with a value in milliseconds
• defaults to 5000 (5 seconds)
• example: <preference name="splash-screen-duration" value="10000" />
• for auto-hide behaviour call navigator.splashscreen.hide(); in the device-ready method
• supported on PhoneGap 2.1.0 and above

Try setting the duration to 0 (<preference name="splash-screen-duration" value="0" />) and see what happens.

*On second thought, it probably isn't a splash screen issue but worth a shot. Post some code of what your app is doing (or share github as suggested) and I will see what I can do.

Answer 2

This is an intermediate screen that Android shows while your process is being forked. The black screen is just your window background as defined by your theme. There is a great article here by Cyril Mottier, an Android Developer Expert, on this topic. You can customise this to look a little nicer as explained in the article (basically just change your window background, but be wary of overdraw)

Answer 3

In 2017, the answer to this problem is a lot simpler:

In config.xml add this line to your widget declaration (just below the bit that readsxmlns:gap="http://phonegap.com/ns/1.0"). This tells PhoneGap you want to add some stuff to the Android Manifest:

xmlns:android = "http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

Then add the snippet below somewhere in the same file. Everything between the config tags will be appended to the Android manifest by PhoneGap when the APK is being generated. This little line will simply make your app background transparent so that the black loading screen is never seen.

<config-file platform="android" parent="/manifest" mode="merge">
    <application android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Translucent.NoTitleBar"></application>
</config-file>