Story of an Out Of Memory exception

[gandharva]

It was year 2012, I built a companion app for a music festival. Home Screen was just a list containing full width images for Pune, Bangalore, and Delhi event. Yep, just three items. I used a ListView with ViewHolder to render everything. Pretty standard stuff, right?

Well, along came Samsung’s flagship device of 2012—the Galaxy S3. A lot of festival-goers were using it, and my app kept crashing on it due to an Out of Memory (OOM) error. The bitmaps were consuming twice as much memory as expected.

If you search on StackOverflow for “[android] samsung out of memory s3,” you’ll find a staggering 35K views. This particular model was acting up. The festival was just 7 days away. I had to make sure to ship in time so that they can also update their apps.

Crash reports were there, but it was difficult to understand what the users were doing and then pin point the root cause. I was constantly monitoring the festival’s hashtag on Twitter and reached out to a few users to understand what they were doing. The screen would load the first time, but when they came back to it from background or any other screen, it would crash.

Here’s where things got creative (or desperate, depending on your perspective 😅): 10 seconds of loading time wasn’t a big deal in 2012, especially on 3G (~1 mbps). So, for this particular model, on every app resume, I showed a 10-second loading, forced garbage collection three times, and hoped for the best! It worked, but at the cost of showing a loading screen on an offline-first app 😳 every time users returned to the home screen.

The app was called NH7 festivapp, which evolved to NH7 InTown > NH7 Insider > PayTM Insider and will now be Zomato District.

Anyone else got crazy mobile dev stories from the early days? I’d love to hear them!

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