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Crash on Waydroid: architecture build issue? #40
Description
Describe the bug
NaturalHour is not running under WayDroid (GNU/Linux contrainer-based approach to launch Android apps), while Suntimes is. Sometimes, the app launches (icon visible on screen) then is immediately killed.
Version Info:
- NaturalHour 0.3.2
- Suntimes 0.16.11
- Android 13 via LineageOS 20 via Waydroid 1.5.4
Additional context
- Suntimes has been installed via F-Droid 1.23.1
- NaturalHour has been installed via apk from this repo.
- Waydroid doc states “The apk files you will sometimes find on the internet tend to only have arm support, and will therefore not work on x86_64. You may want to install F-Droid to get applications graphically.”
Activity
forrestguice commentedon Nov 9, 2025
hrm, I'm not sure what the issue might be.
There isn't any 'native code' in NaturalHour and afaik the binary produced by Android Studio is a "fat apk" so it should support both x86 and arm.
It is interesting that Suntimes itself works. Unlike the addons it is built by F-Droid (but it also has a lower targetSdkVersion, so there are other differences). It might be useful to try the other addons and see if they run or not. The IntervalMidpoints and SuntimesNFC apps have similar dependencies and are built the same way as NaturalHour.
There might also be something useful in the logcat. I haven't used Waydroid (yet), but I found https://docs.waydro.id/debugging/getting-essential-information which should help with that.
XanderLeaDaren commentedon Nov 9, 2025
Thanks for your answer.
I noticed you recently updated an F-Droid repo, which is fully functional under F-Droid/Waydroid.
WayDroid logcat outputs 21000+ lines of info, with 84 references to NaturalHour when launching it. It seems tedious to look it through, what do you think?
forrestguice commentedon Nov 13, 2025
This is very useful information, thank you.
I'm feeling cautiously optimistic we can figure this out.
There is a line in that app's manifest that restricts it to devices with actual nfc hardware. It is only a suggestion for app stores though (the package installer doesn't check). I have an older device with nfc, but none of my newer devices are fancy enough to support it.
SuntimesCalendars is actually built and signed by F-Droid, and then I mirror it to the other repo. It is the same for the main Suntimes app. I build all of the other addons myself and sign those with my own key. I suspect the differences lies elsewhere though, especially given that SuntimesNFC seems to run fine.
That's understandable. There is a lot of noise in the log. If its possible to monitor the output in real time, that should be easier.
I've added some basic crash reporting which should hopefully capture the crash (but who knows, that mechanism may also crash). There is now a "nightly" version of NaturalHour at https://forrestguice.github.io/NaturalHour-nightly/fdroid/repo/ that gets built from the latest commit. Hopefully make debugging this a little easier.
XanderLeaDaren commentedon Nov 15, 2025
Hi, there, thanks for the investigation!
I installed the nightly version and got the following. Hope it’ll help!
FragmentContainerView
forrestguice commentedon Nov 15, 2025
I think this is some kind of fragment lifecycle bug, maybe because of the static
<fragment>declared in the layout (vs adding fragments later dynamically). I think the crash itself occurs because the fragment tries to initialize its data before the activity itself has interacted with Suntimes (so certain required values are empty/null). For whatever reason the initialization is different and that code is running out of expected order. 😕 SuntimesNFC is super simple (doesn't declare any fragments), and SuntimesCalendars declares them dynamically.There should be an update to the nightly version - maybe this allows it to run.
I have left the lines that were crashing alone though (so that it may continue to crash until the underlying issue is resolved).
NaturalHourData
forrestguice commentedon Nov 21, 2025
I now have Waydroid up and running, but I'm unfortunately unable to reproduce the problem. All of the addon apps are running correctly for me. There must be something more to it. :\
... or maybe not. I think I was mistaken about that. SolunarPeriods is also very simple (no fragments). I've prepared a nightly version of that app with crash reporting at https://forrestguice.github.io/SolunarPeriods-nightly/fdroid/repo/. The report it creates might be helpful.
There should also be an update available for the nightly version of NaturalHour. I've fixed the lines that were crashing, but since I don't fully understand why it was happening I'm not sure what to expect when it runs..