Android bugs

Hi all,

I did some digging and was able to find more information on this topic. It looks like this feature was removed because it used a lot of resources for us to continue supporting it, considering that only a few learners actively used it. As @alanh advised, you can read more in the forum archives above.

Sadly, there are no plans to reintroduce it as of now. :frowning:

Best,
A.

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Hi Alessio @ale_c

I remember the feature operating perfectly and being completely stable, so I can’t imagine it taking much (if any) ongoing maintenance effort from Memrise developers. So its sudden removal still doesn’t make any obvious sense to me.

Thank you for investigating this and replying to my query. Memrise’s response to user questions has improved a lot since you’ve got involved in these discussion boards, which is much appreciated.

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@ale_c, @JBorrego, @MemriseSupport: Here’s a couple of problems that I’ve come across over the last few versions:

  • application hang: somewhere between the 20th and 24th course I’m working through each day (some I just skip over, but I select them to keep my order), the app will suddenly hang shortly during a session. At the end of that session, it’ll take up to 30s until I get back to the course’s main screen (I even get the recommendation to close the app from Android). To resolve the problem, I close the app after the session and restart, from there it’ll be fine until I’m done (44 courses altogether).
  • scroll problem: the app no longer scrolls to the current chapter/level automatically; this is particularly annoying when working on long courses resp. courses with many chapters
  • sync problem: the app doesn’t synchronize neither the order of courses nor the currently selected course between Android devices (I’m using both a tablet and a mobile phone).
  • the “link” between official Memrise courses still hasn’t been restored (i. e. a button resp. an area at the bottom of the levels to go from, for instance, course 1 to 2 and the one at the top that would lead from 2 to 1.

Any chance you guys fix these issues soon …?

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Hey Olaf, sorry about this. Sadly I wasn’t able to reproduce these problems.

A few notes:

  • Scroll problem: the course should take you back to the level your learned/reviewed last. In case you started a review session last, the app might take you to one of the previous levels that contain those items.
  • Sync problem: this one I was able to reproduce, although I was switching between devices within seconds, so I’ll try again to see if it happens with longer intervals as well. Please note that it might take a few minutes for the apps to receive the updated progress. If you have issues syncing your progress across devices even after several hours, please let me know.

To solve the ‘application hang’ issue, could you please reinstall the app and confirm if it still happens? Please also confirm your device(s) model, OS and app version. I seem to recall that you’ve already posted these details in some other threads, but I can’t find them quickly again now, so if you could post them here as well, it’d be appreciated :slight_smile:

Finally, please note that the link between courses has been removed between our old courses, such as the ones in the picture below with the faded out pics. The reason behind this is that these courses are now unlisted and we encourage our learners to start our new courses instead, which do have these buttons.

Best,
Alessio

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@Olaf.Rabbachin @ale_c

application hang - can’t tell if Olaf is talking about the same problem, but I saw it a few times recently, though maybe in different circumstances.

scroll problem - I’m doing only learning and review sessions for some courses, and each time I have to start learning sessions from the first level.

sync problem - not all courses, but some of them are appearing in different order on my PC in comparison to phone app. Right now I see at least two such courses.

@JBorrego @ale_c

By all appearances, new learning modes are about to emerge, but should this board look like a swiss cheese with diminutive buttons?

You’ve moved learning button away from the center of the screen and it’s not easy to reach it now (try to tap it with your big finger). Besides, these numbers are really distracting and identical icons are not helpful. Have you thought about putting some colour on them?

The problem is: it doesn’t. Not like always, but like most of the time. Sometimes it also leaves me at the very last lesson, even though I haven’t completed loads of previous levels.

Will do asap. As for the devices: Huawei MediaPad M3, running Android 7 (that’s the device I use most of the time) and a Samsung Galaxy S10e, running Android 10.

That’s quite annoying, to say the least. I’d never work through all of those courses again, I’d be bored to death! Is there anything like an auto-progress feature for the items already learned?
Also, this is true for all of the Memrise courses I took - surely you haven’t provided new versions for all of them (I could provide a list, if required)!?
FWIW, I don’t see as to why the link between courses should no longer be there anyway, what good would that do?

To repro the hang, you’ll probably have to go through some 20+ courses (and do sessions in like 8-10) and work for at least 60 to 80 minutes, that’s when it happens here.

I’ve raised these issues with the team, however unfortunately I don’t have any timeframe for a fix. Please keep me updated on the status of the problem (e.g if it gets better or worse).

I understand this is annoying especially when you’re learning a lot of courses, however sadly it won’t be changed. This should only happen with our old courses, e.g. French 1&2, German 1&2, etc. Once you move to more advanced courses, such as French 3, the links will be there but they will redirect to our new courses (i.e. clicking on ‘Previous course’ on French 3 will take you to our new French 2 course). Sorry for the confusion around this.

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Hi, can you please clarify what these ‘different circumstances’ are? This will help us pinpoint where the issue lies

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@ale_c @Olaf.Rabbachin

I’m not reviewing per day as many courses as Olaf, usually it’s about 4-5 courses, maybe up to 6-8 max. Somewhere during summer I’ve noticed that my phone has been getting hot while I’m doing speed reviews, as if I’m playing a videogame which consumes a lot of phone resourses. There was also a laggy response from the app, like a pause of milliseconds after correct answer. It never happened before with this app.

I’ve reinstalled my app and it worked OK for some time, but then it happenned again. Primarily I was blaming incorrect installation of the app, thinking that files had been overwritten incorrectly or something of that kind.

In September and October there were about 3-4 incidents when app asked me to close it because of an error (you see a pop-up message when you could close an app ot restart it). I’m also aware that sometimes my phone is getting hot again, but not as much as in summer, and I’m also noticing a lag from time to time.

Well, now it’s different, my guess is that Memrise app at some moment is starting to consume too many resourses (RAM or whatever), remember that Olaf is going over dozens of courses and I could do my reviews for about an hour, and that’s why we have this problem.

UPD. In summer I’ve also been doing a lot of clean-up - opening up to 30 courses, sometimes all of them, just to keep them in sort of an order. Any tools - though pins is my preferred method - from your team to sort them would be greatly appreciated.

UPD2. I forgot to tell, while phone was getting hot, battery life has been discharging like snow disappears in March.

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If this is not related to all your courses, I suppose the link is missing for courses where it shouldn’t.
I’ve already gone through all 7 iterations of most of the official Memrise courses that I have been working on. The lowest one I’m still working on is EN-RU (at the end of 3).
However, I never see the link anywhere in i.e. the courses EN-NL, EN-SV or DE-IT (all 1-7) or DE-ES (1-6).

FWIW, I do have to say that I can not in the least understand as to why you would remove those links and then refuse to bring them back - what on earth are you guys always thinking when removing good features (particularly those that only get removed for certain courses!)? It feels like this has happened a zillion times already
And why do you, instead of working on existing problems, continuously keep introducing new features that consume your dev time and carry no noticeable advantage whatsoever? A recent example is the new button list: I’m really having a hard time of holding back my comments, once more. Nothing problematic with this (apart from its underwhelming design), but it’s just not necessary, at least not unless (or until) you introduce like a dozen new buttons that fill all those gaps.
It’s just so incredible, irritating and very sad to see how you guys seem to be completely wasting your resources and then complain that you haven’t enough of them elsewhere.

So, at the end of last week, I went ahead and first cleared the cache, removed all data, uninstalled the app, rebooted my device and then reinstalled the app.

The hang-problem is definitely still there, I didn’t notice any change so far to this respect. I can add that, today (not much time on my hands) I only worked on the still unfinished courses and only repeated stuff there. That means, I went through the first ~20 courses and only worked on 9 courses until the problem appeared. This took some 30mins, so the problem could rather be related to the number of courses rather than the time spent.

Also and most notably, the links between the courses are now back for every course group I currently have on my radar. Another issue that might be connected to caching or app data?

There is a problem with the feature though: I start out with the 1st course and then scroll down to the end and use the link to the next one (way quicker than having to go through the dashboard!); many times I’ll do that for all 7 courses.
This seems to only trigger some sort of refresh on the first time, i.e. when use this to go from 1 to 7 and then tap the “…” button, it will still give me the figures of the very first one. I’ll have to go back to dashboard and back (the main page might have done the trick too, not certain) and then tap the “…” again to actually make the app “activate” the course.

A post was split to a new topic: Items to review for courses with more than 1000 items ends with 999+ sign

Thanks both, I’ll add all this info to the ticket (Internal tracking code QA-719)

Thanks again for your patience.

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@JBorrego @ale_c @MemriseSupport

Such a curious fact:

  1. Memrise app has offline mode

  2. app won’t start if

a) your internet connection is turned off,
b) internet connection is turned on, but you don’t have connection (actually, it could start, but not that easy)

Which leads us to the quite contradictory bottom line:

  1. you can’t use offline mode if you don’t have internet connection

Don’t you think something is wrong here?

Hi @Hombre_sin_nombre,

This is not the expected behaviour of the app. We have tested this on the latest Android release and the app is opening as usual in airplane mode.

Do you have any screenshots of what happens when you try to load up the app when offline?

Thanks,
Memrise team

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Yep, I have. This is how it looks in airplane mode.

Did you try and clear the cache/local data? I tried with mine and didn’t have any problems. I actually went ahead and cleared all data two days or so ago because the app wouldn’t start and always presented an error message when loading (something like “oops, data leak …”).

I’ve tried now, but without much success. Keep stuck on the same screen.

P.S. Could you, please, use “reply to” button (which is grey, not blue)? Don’t know if you are talking to me or somebody else. :slight_smile: