Understanding Android Tight Loops / Spin-On-Suspend Error

I am developing a game on android, 'Space RPG' - currently only seeing this error pop up on most Galaxy S4s, and HTC Ones. This is all Java. The game will stall, when I try to debu

Solution 1:

This is probably http://b.android.com/58726.

The bug has full details; in short: some vendors appear to use a modified version of the Dalvik VM. Changes made to the JIT compiler prevent thread suspension from occurring in certain situations.

The litmus test for this issue is to compare the standard retail device against the "pure Android" Google Play Edition of the GS4 and HTC1. If the former shows the broken behavior, but the latter works correctly, you are likely seeing a vendor-specific problem.

The workaround is to do what you've done: make the code less efficient so it doesn't fall into the "optimized" case. Ideally the app would runtime-select a different code path for devices without the issue, but I don't know of a good way to detect the problem at run time.