Screen flickers when running on Android 4.2. (Activity gets restarted continuously)

Question

Some users reported that my app screen sometimes flickers when running on Android 4.2 (only!)

I tried on my device, and after putting logs, the activity is restarted and restarted again, about 3 times a second.

So what I did is to trace the method calls when it restarts continually, and here is the result:

It seems that the problem lies in the ViewGroup.resetRtlProperties(), since this is new in Android 4.2 (17).

I can't confirm yet if this is a bug, but is there anyone else experiencing this or have any workarounds?

Dayton

This might be a silly question, but how do I open this window with CPU usage stats by methods? – Athabaska

This is TraceView. developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-tracing.html – Misnomer

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and it was caused by a combination of the following two:

• An activity in landscape orientation (while the device preferred portrait)
• Code in onConfigurationChanged() of the Application subclass that changed the locale of the newConfig parameter

Instead of changing newConfig you can clone that object and change/use the clone:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
    Configuration configClone = new Configuration(newConfig);
    // Change/use configClone here
    ...
}

Filet

it works, just one question, if i were to change the Configuration in other place beside 'onConfigurationChanged', do i still need to clone? – Yockey

Answer 2

Apparently, adding layoutDirection to the list of android:configChanges of your <activity> in the AndroidManifest.xml fixed this problem.

Dayton

how did you find this issue? – Alumnus