Why my iOS App's Documents directory became a file? - ios

We are developing an iOS app with Enterprise distribution.
It ran well in hundreds of devices, but we found some iOS 6.1.3 devices failed to launch it hours later the first run, because the App's Documents directory became a file !
Our App did nothing special except it was downloading about 80MB MP4 files from a remote HTTP server.
I assumed that something wrong when it operated the Documents directory, but so far have little clue to identify what's 'dangerous' usage in our codes.
Did you have encountered similar problems? How did you fix it?
Thanks a lot to anybody kindly helping to figure it out.

What I suggest doing is for your app to test for this when it launches, and if there is a file there, move it to some other place (like the temp folder), then create the Documents directory, then move the file back into that directory with the same name (or change the name). That will at least prevent your app from stalling.
If you have any means of remote logging, you could bin hex the first 64 bytes of the file and send it to your service for analysis (if you know what's in the file it should help you figure out who created it.)

Related

Image.file() Showing Blank When Specified File Was Explicitly Created

In the iOS variant of my Flutter app, when I explicitly create a .jpg file using
File(path.join(filePath, fileName))
..createSync(recursive: true)
..writeAsBytesSync(buffer);
the widget that renders the file (by calling Image.file(), passing to it the file as an argument) results with a blank image.
No exception was thrown indicating that the file was not found or file contents was invalid. Its behaving as if the file is blank, but when I browse to the file using Finder, the file is there and when I click on the image, Preview renders the expected image.
When the same code is executed when the image comes from the device camera or device gallery, it works and when the same code is executed in the Android variant with the file being explicitly created, it works too.
The only thing I can think of is that it has to do with creating the image deep inside my iOS simulator directory structure
ie-/Users/joselitope/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/F2AE8082-E670-498B-B2C6-9A83BE1855A4/data/Containers/Data/Application/7B01A347-69AE-4A1F-8567-7FCC256013F5/tmp/comp_image_cropper_2CC9EEFB-A126-4811-BD80-485B4C41F3A2-18523-00001C049E5AAE85.jpg
but again, the file is visible using Finder so this may not be the reason.
Maybe I have to set certain permissions when creating the file in iOS or perhaps settings applicable to iOS in my pubspec.yaml?
All help is greatly appreciated.
My environment is as follows:
Catelina 10.15.7,
Flutter 1.22.5 channel stable,
XCode 12.3,
Simulator: iPhone 12 Pro Max - 14.3,
Someone posted a suggestion that prompted me to look into this problem again. (That someone has since removed his suggestion so I am unable to thank him.)
Anyways, when I tried to reproduce the problem it wasnt happening anymore even in the exact use case it was happening previously.
So the question remains is why and the only thing I ruled out that it wasnt a race condition as this code has been running on Android for quite some time on various devices.
This is what I could come up with:
Knowing the filepath I was writing to, I realized that I was writing to the app's /tmp directory which iOS periodically empties out. I am thinking that I shouldn't be putting stuff there. Instead, I've been writing to the app's documents directory and it hasnt happened since.
The initial /tmp directory was chosen for me by a package I was using and since it was so long and Im new to iOS, I didn't really look into it all that much, caring only that the file was there, which it was.
Anyways, keeping my fingers crossed that the fix sticks.

Transfer file from iOS app to computer while debugging

For a native iOS application we are integrating a C++ library which is writing some logs to disk to json file.
During debugging, we would like to access to this logs, but currently we can only do it by downloading the whole app container to the macOS machine and searching for the file there.
Since this a very time consuming operation we were hoping that there would be some solution that would allows us to get this file quickly. I did take a look to the lldb commands, but none of them seem to let you extract a file from the phone.
Is there anyway to do this in a quick way?
Thank you
Couple options...
1 - Add debug-only code in your app to share the log file (via AirDrop would probably be a good option).
or
2 - During debug, set these two keys (in project settings / info) to Yes:
Application supports iTunes file sharing
Supports opening documents in place
Once you've done that, you can open / copy files from your app's Documents directory (assuming that's where the logs are being written) from Finder on your Mac.

Is application bundle fully replaced on upgrade from App Store?

The following use case:
create a strings file (not localized) and deploy the application to your test device
localize the file (en.lproj or similar), make some changes to the new file and remove the original file
deploy the application on the device
What I noticed that very often (always?) the application will still use the old non-localized file. The reason is that apparently the file is still in somewhere the application bundle, even though it has been removed from the project. iOS's logic is that if a file of a specific type is looked up, it first checks in the root of the bundle for the non-localized version, and only if it doesn't find it does it go deeper into the localized folders. (Is it just me, or is this logic kind of backwards? I'm used to first looking for language specific file, and then falling back to some defaults, but it might be my Java background.)
Sometimes (always?) removing the app from the device completely doesn't help either. What does in this case is a CMD+SHIFT+K, which cleans the build folder, and after the app is built and deployed again, the correct file is used.
A worse problem would be if such a thing leads to an app crash, like some strange issues with Nibs or whatever - I have seen those as well...
The question is: what would happen if the first version of my app in the apple store had the non-localized file, and the second version localized it? When the user upgrades the app, would they get the same behavior as me during development (i.e. outdated, non-localized file used)?
I can't imagine because I think this would be a cause of a lot of grieving and bug requests, but I can't tell for sure as I haven't yet published any iOS app.
If the behavior is correct when upgrading from the store, why is it? What is so different? Are the files stored locally on my computer somewhere and used when I deploy?
Can anybody share their experiences?

Files getting deleted mysteriously from the Documents Folder

We have an iOS application for the iPad that is having strange behavior. We store the state of the app in an XML file in the documents folder. Every once in a while our testers are reporting that when the application crashes the file on the disk gets deleted as well. This is very strange, since I can't figure out what can be causing this. Any pointers to how I can debug this issue.
The problem is complicated by the fact that this happens randomly and only on certain ipads(generally iPad2). We are using NSData initWithcontentOfFile.
By any chance can this be related to memory mapping of the files.
Make sure you are writing atomically

Trying to publish an AIR for iOS app using Flash CS5.5, but no ipa is being produced

I've finally obtained an iOS developer license, I've managed to publish a hello world, basic kind of app, get an IPA file and install it on my iphone.
However, now i'm trying something more complex, including using imported libraries. I start the publish process as usual, no error is produced but i'm not getting a message that the ipa is ready.
When i look at the target directory I have folders named like 'AOTBuildOutput5264907783565294361.tmp' with files in them.
Looks like it crashes in the middle, but I get no error message to debug!
Please help me find out where I can read these error messages or provide some other kind of insight!
Thanks in advance
Rotem
I've occasionally run into problems like this. It usually occurs when I'm trying to publish the app from my dropbox folder whilst it is trying to sync.
I can only assume that the problem happens because another application is accessing that file (in my case dropbox).
So make sure nothing else is trying to sync to that folder. Hope that helps.
I ended up moving my development folder to somewhere else in my filesystem and everything went fine. I guess having hebrew charachters in the path didn't work so well for the compiler.

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