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:

method trace output

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?

This might be a silly question, but how do I open this window with CPU usage stats by methods? — Anton Cherkashyn, Nov 19 '12 at 05:28
This is TraceView. http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-tracing.html — Randy Sugianto 'Yuku', Nov 19 '12 at 09:19

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 05 '12 at 00:22

7

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
    ...
}

answered Dec 05 '12 at 00:22

Adam Nybäck

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Seems to be usefull. Thank you – Roman Truba Mar 20 '13 at 12:58
it works, just one question, if i were to change the Configuration in other place beside 'onConfigurationChanged', do i still need to clone? – Zul May 30 '13 at 02:47

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 20 '13 at 14:59

3

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

answered Mar 20 '13 at 14:59

Randy Sugianto 'Yuku'

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how did you find this issue? – Pinser Jun 06 '16 at 15:06

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

2 Answers2