Multiple bugs with latest iPad app (5.9.0)

Channels iOS
#1

Unfortunately there are multiple bugs with the 5.90 iPad app, some of which are not subtle.
Perhaps most problematic is that search results display "too high" up the screen, so that sometimes only the bottom few pixels of the results display below that tab bar showing Shows, Movies, Episodes, etc; sometimes not even those few pixels so that it looks like no matches are available.

Second (seems trivial, but is endlessly irritating) is that moving away from any of the "deeper" screens in Guide reverts you to the top of Guide. For example, suppose I go to Guide, then tap the button in the upper right to get On Later, then tap the More> of On Tonight. If I then move away from the list of On Tonight, either within the app (by tapping Search) or outside the app (by context switching to say IMDB) when I return to Guide I will have been bounced back up to the "front page" of Guide, ie the list of channels and times.

Third there appears to be a memory leak in the display of posters, especially associated with pages that can show many posters like the On Tonight or Upcoming Movies full pages. Symptoms are that we move from all the posters being shown correctly to half the poster slots are blank, half show a poster, to a minute or so later the app crashes. This is absolutely reliable, it happens I'd guess about once a day, always when I am scanning either On Tonight or Upcoming Movies, while I have a PiP quarter window playing some Channels DVR recorded content.

These are all on a 1TB iPad Pro with M2 and latest iOS. They are not the result of resource constraints or anything like that...

Please fix ASAP :slight_smile:

#2

Thanks for pointing some of these out!

  1. Search: yeah, this isn't great, and we're on it.

  2. This is by design. Tabs reset themselves after a period of time specifically so when you enter them, you're not deep in the navigation stack having to use the back button multiple times just to get where you wanted to go. It's also confusing landing deep in a stack if you weren't the person that navigated there. Imagine this happening days after the navigation happened. When someone goes to Guide or Movies, they're going to expect to see those things, if they don't, it's extremely confusing.

  3. We'll investigate.

#3

Glad to hear you are on it. Certainly my iPad has reported a string of crashes to Apple, one a day, for at least the past three months or so (bug 3 was present event before 5.90) so if those crash reports are also sent to you there should be a clear pattern embedded in them.

Regarding issue 2, might I suggest that you add something like a 5 minute timer to this? I get where you are coming from, but it's crazy irritating to be trying to scan On Tonight or Upcoming Movies, seeing if there's something you might want to record and EVERY TIME you either move to IMDB (to see if the movie looks good) or to Search (to see if maybe you already recorded it) you lose your place in the stack.
A five minute timer seems like a reasonable and intuitive compromise.

#4

It’s set to 2 minutes. And this is the first we’ve heard anyone have an issue with it.

Movies now show if they’re already in your library as of 5.9.0. This is for On Now results, airing search results, and even directly from the guide. The poster is badged with a book icon.

#5

Movies do show as already recorded under many circumstances (I'm guessing if they were recorded as part of the same "virtual network" like Pluto vs Plex vs Samsung? But the badges don't capture all cases (eg movie is sometimes marked in the guide as TV, sometimes even as live TV!)

Getting this right is tough, so I haven't complained about it, but it's a fact that while the badge is very convenient, it can't yet be 100% trusted.

As for the two minutes, did this break in 5.90?
My earlier experience has been that

  • search within the app was never a problem (two minute rule maybe?)
  • switching to IMDB has always been a problem

I suspect that if two minutes were enforced and actually worked bug-free in both cases (brief within-app switch, and brief switch to another app) I'd be happy.

We can try to burrow down into this further if necessary but it may be relevant, as I said earlier, that I'm almost always playing a Channels stream in a PiP quarter window while I am engaged in these activities, so it's possible that PiP handling involves a path you usually don't test that's overwriting this two minute timer?

#6

Yes, movies recorded from third party data form custom channels are not guaranteed to work as they do not have the same metadata or unique IDs to uniquely identify them. This is common for content recorded from third party custom channels, as is them not always working with other features built into Channels for our first party data.

As for switching the app during the potential countdown for resetting, that could be an issue. I'll take a look to see if something is going wrong, but if anything, I would expect it to just NEVER reset. I would expect the timers to fail rather than happen right away.

PIP should have no bearing on the way the views work.

#7

This may warrant a new thread but since i think the app is the same as TVOS I'll post here.

I sometimes get in a position where i am a couple of levels deep into a menu. Specifically UpNext -> show more button. I press the back button and it dumps me to the home screen. I reopen channels and I land back in the same menu position. Hit back again and same thing happens (home screen). The only way to recover is to navigate left right up or down to select another show tile and then press back and it takes me up a level in the menu structure and it behaves normally.

Ill try to get a video next time
(Also this is on latest test flight)

1 Like
#8

So, This is just tvOS wonkiness with focus and or the back button. I've watched this happen for years. A lot of times it's because you may hit the back button while tvOS is still animating view transitions in or out.

#9

OK, I did some experimenting based on what you said.

For MOST use cases, the timer works correctly. Going to IMDB works (this is a fix relative to pre-5.90) and is nice!
And for all tabs EXCEPT GUIDE the timer works. So if I am at say

  • the On Now tab, then I go in one level to the "On Tonight"/"On This Week" page, then tap Search, I don't lose my place when I return to On Now.
  • same with most other variants of this, like if I am in Home/Collections and go to Settings then back to Home.

The one case that is broken is Guide. If I am somewhere past the front page in Guide, then tap Home (or Search or Settings) and return to Guide I have lost where I was past the first page. Unfortunately the use case I care about I am always two or three pages deep in Guide, so that was the case I noticed.