What to do when the RunPee app crashes or you spot a bug

Monday night (August 5, 2024) was not a good night to need to use the RunPee app on Android. I updated the app in the Play Store and then much to my dismay got an email from a fan telling me that the app crashed for them every time they opened it.

I checked and… It worked on my phone.

Then I got another email, and another.

By the way, this is a developer’s nightmare. When something breaks for some people but not for the developer, it is very hard to fix the issue. We start by guessing what might cause the bug and try to fix that, but without being able to verify the fix until someone else tests it. If that doesn’t work we try to figure out how we can replicate the bug on our device so that we’ll know when it’s fixed. It’s all very stressful and maddening.

It took a while, but I was able to replicate the crash. The only problem was that the app only crashed from the Play Store but not when I built it locally and tested it on my device. So the testing turnaround time was about an hour.

Suffice to say, I eventually fixed the issue. It was some code dependency or configuration issue. (That’s a very common.) I didn’t have time to change one thing at a time so that I would know exactly what the issue was. I needed to try bundles of changes each time and hope that one of them was the fix. (And hope that none of the other changes broke something else.) That was what was most important to me: fixing it. Knowing exactly what the problem was in the first place is the icing on the cake.

What to do in case of crash

I’m grateful to the fans who took the time to email me and let me know that the app was broken. I received a few dozen emails and responded to everyone and then followed up when the fix was available. That’s why I’m writing this post: so that you’ll know what to do in case of an app crash or if you discover a bug.

If the app is crashing, especially if it happens on startup, then you can’t exactly use the app to contact me. In that event the best way to reach me is email: [email protected]. You can also reach out to me on Discord. Which ever method you choose I need to know if you have an iOS or Android phone and preferably which version of the RunPee app you have. You should be able to long-press on the app icon and go to the App Info screen to get the version.

What NOT to do

Please don’t go to the app store and leave a review/comment about the bug. This advice honestly applies to every app on your phone. That’s not what reviews are for. For sure, if the developers clearly are not doing their job over a period of time to address serious issues and don’t respond to your emails then sure, they deserve a poor rating and a comment. But to just jump there first thing is really soul crushing for us devs. Please use that option as a last resort.

 

It’s you, not me

Another common problem might be that there’s an issue with the server. If that happens then you’ll see an animated gif of John Travolta (From Pulp Fiction) looking lost. That either means your phone doesn’t have a connection to the Internet or that there’s a problem with the RunPee server. I would ask you to assume that it’s the former because theaters are notorious for having bad cell reception.

In the past the host that I used for the RunPee API ran on the same server as the blog. That was a horrible idea, because if something happened, like an article about RunPee at CNN.com then the traffic to the blog would overwhelm the server and both the blog and the API would be affected. Now they are on completely separate machines (DigitalOcean). I check the server usage every day and it runs pretty steady between 2% and 6% capacity. That means RunPee could get about a 16x bump in traffic and still manage. Actually, it can take a lot more than that for a short burst because the server will temporarily expand to accommodate the traffic.

There’s a slight chance that it could be a bug in the server-side code, but again that is unlikely. Not because I write amazing PHP code, but because each version of the RunPee app has it’s own version of server-side code that doesn’t change.

Bugs or usability issues in the app

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the stability of the RunPee app code. I’ve fixed all of the known bugs, but there are a few usability/features that users have requested that I will get to in time. If you spot something that doesn’t work, or if you think of something that could work better then please let me know, either via email ([email protected]) or there are numerous places in the RunPee app where you can send a message—such as the bottom of every Peetime synopsis.

Typos and mistakes in the Peetime data

This is what 90% of the user feedback is about. We try our best, but there are sometimes typos and mistakes in the Peetimes. For example, for Deadpool & Wolverine I used the name Cassandra in a place where I should have used Laura. Like I said, we try our best, but sometimes our brains mix things up and we don’t notice. Fortunately, it’s so easy for users to reach me via the Peetime Synopis screen that I get fans who take a moment to send me the corrections.

The other common feedback we get is on our choice of Peetime. Honestly, I would have expected this would be much more common, but we rarely get much pushback on our choice of Peetimes. If you think we’ve chosen a poor Peetime then certainly let us know. In most cases we would agree that it’s not a great Peetime, but it’s the best we could do for that span of the movie. We try to have the first Peetime before the 30-minute point in a movie, but that can be a challenge because obviously there are a lot of characters introduced early in a movie and those are always poor choices for Peetimes. After that we try to have a Peetime within the next 30-minutes of the movie until the end. That’s usually not too hard, but it depends on the movie.

Remember, Peetimes aren’t necessarily the boring bits of a movie. Instead, they are scenes in a movie that are easy to summarize concisely without losing the essential meaning. A Peetime with important exposition or plot development isn’t ideal, but if we can summarize that information then it’s a candidate as a Peetime. Conversely, a dramatic or emotional scene is never a good Peetime.

Where do we go from here?

The RunPee app is in great shape right now. Thanks to our fans we get enough donations to sustain our efforts and pay a few bills. My next big feature addition to the app will be to include options for other languages and eventually movies that are limited to specific countries. I would love to have this in the app by the end of the year, but honestly, this is probably the biggest addition to the app that I’ve ever had. So I’m not going to set a deadline for myself. It will be available when it’s tested and ready to go public.

As always, I love to hear from our fans what we can do to make the app better for you. You can comment below, or if you would like to discuss something you can email me. ([email protected])