DiscourseHub on iPad is closing unexpectedly

Sorry, this will be the most useless bug report ever.

When I’m reading several topics, the Hub will close unexpectedly. I can’t pinpoint the exact number of topics needed to cause this, but I red new topics here last night, and this morning I had something like a dozen in /latest. On the OpenAI forum, the same thing happens sooner than here, because there are many more new posts and quite a few topics are longer.

The hub isn’t crashing. It just closes itself and returns to its home screen. The last visit mark will be correct, but that is expected because it comes from Discourse, not from the Hub.

This isn’t related to the new iPadOS, 17.7.x or 18, because it started a bit sooner. I would claim it started when we got those useful icons and the hiding connect button. But sure, I don’t know that for sure. And I don’t know if the same would happen on iPhones too, because I’m using it for quick peeks only.

How to try this…. Well, buy a basic iPad 10gen and read quite a bit using DiscourseHub. Sorry guys, I don’t know how I could give more info :man_shrugging:

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Yes, I was able to reproduce this on iPad. No repro on iPhone… strange issue, will look into it some more.

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I’m having a hard time reproducing this reliably. I spent a lot of time on iPad on meta and a few other sites today, and could only repro this once.

I was in a topic, I was scrolling, with my thumb close to the Discourse topic timeline at the time. I think this is related to scrolling, when I leave the iPad idle on a topic or topic list, it doesn’t happen.

Ok, I have a fairly persistent repro, and I can see that the webview process terminates itself. I looked at the iPad system logs (via the Console app on macOS when the iPad is set up for development), and nothing in particular stands out, this is happening at the OS level. Chances are that it’s unrelated to the recent app updates.

It’s going to be quite tricky to fix it, I’ll keep poking at it though. One test I’d like to make is to navigate meta or openAI for a while on regular Safari and see if that runs into any problems. Another possibility is that this is a memory management issue at the OS level. I’ll see if I can repro the issue by navigating the pages of a community more slowly.

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I don’t think we’ve fixed this issue, although I haven’t been able to reproduce it recently. That said, there’s a new beta of the mobile app out at Join the Discourse Hub beta - TestFlight - Apple with a possible workaround.

I could repro similar issues in Safari on iOS where the browser notices the page crashes and reloads it. In the new beta of the mobile app, we do the same, on a crash, we reload the same page. In theory, it should be slightly better.

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I tried using my trustworth test bench: OpenAI forum and Dall-E topics :smirk:

The hub crashes, but after a short white screen it returned back to topic. Not at exacly same spot, but a bit earlier. Better that way.

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Which iPad do you have? I was on the DallE topics too the other day… couldn’t repro.

Ordinary 10th gen.

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@Jagster can you still repro this at will on the DallE topics? I made a possible related change in core but not sure if it affects this. Thanks!

I red… quite many posts with AI-images, scrolled quite a bit /latest and looked thru topics where always was over 20 posts. All I got was twice a really short time, a blink of an eye, blanco page and after that 2 seconds loading bar before that topic opened. Nothing else.

At the moment I would say you fixed it :+1:

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And… few seconds ago here. I was reading latest ones, and because I visit here quite often there wasn’t too many unread topics, and any of them wasn’t too long, plus Meta was the first on my morning tour, this fell: Discourse Icon

But I have to say that some days now has been totally fine. That’s why I was suprized when it happened.

I don’t know… it has been quite calm now and it looks like I’m the only one who’s complaining plus market share of combo ipad+hub must be really small, perhaps this thing isn’t worth of work.

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