70 app limit on Hero (Sprint)?

[Sweed]

of course they're gonna test it for bugs, but I I can tell you now that it never occurred to them to test how many apps it can hold with ought bugging out.

 

[ohmarni]

of course they're gonna test it for bugs, but I I can tell you now that it never occurred to them to test how many apps it can hold with ought bugging out.

Hmm...if that's true, this worries me. As a software developer, I can tell you that this should have been tested...especially with Android, given that the App Market is such a big selling point of this phone. As I posted before, I don't think this is happening on the GSM version of this phone. I haven't read about it for the Tattoo or the Eris either, but I think both of those are running the 1.6 Android version and not 1.5 as with the Sprint Hero. In order to make 1.5 work for CDMA, HTC had to further extend their own framework. This is a good place to start looking and I certainly hope that they thoroughly test the 2.1 update to keep from having these issues.

Over all, I really like this phone. I just hate this issue. It's driving me nuts. That said, I believe HTC will fix the issue. I've had three HTC Android phones and two HTC WinMo phones. Of all those phones, the Magic was my favorite. The Hero will absolutely take over that slot when we get an update to Android 2.1 and they fix this issue.

 

[Sweed]

Hmm...if that's true, this worries me. As a software developer, I can tell you that this should have been tested...especially with Android, given that the App Market is such a big selling point of this phone. As I posted before, I don't think this is happening on the GSM version of this phone. I haven't read about it for the Tattoo or the Eris either, but I think both of those are running the 1.6 Android version and not 1.5 as with the Sprint Hero. In order to make 1.5 work for CDMA, HTC had to further extend their own framework. This is a good place to start looking and I certainly hope that they thoroughly test the 2.1 update to keep from having these issues.

Over all, I really like this phone. I just hate this issue. It's driving me nuts. That said, I believe HTC will fix the issue. I've had three HTC Android phones and two HTC WinMo phones. Of all those phones, the Magic was my favorite. The Hero will absolutely take over that slot when we get an update to Android 2.1 and they fix this issue.

well I supposed the 1.6 update should solve the issue then.
although I support htc and understand how this flaw could have gotten past them, I must admit that I don't understand why they haven't fixed it.

it seems to me like the obvious solution is to copy the software exactly from there other htc sence phone that aren't experiencing this problem.

then again (as you said) maybe it's a problem with cdma. that could very well be.
if it is, then maybe the droid eris has this problem. can anybody confirm this?

also: if the above is correct then cdma tattoos may have this problem too. (have they released a cdma tattoo yet? I heard that they're going to but I'm not sure.

 

[fireheadman]

Hello... I do not usually subscribe to forums, but once my HERO rebooted, I experienced all of the issues noted in this thread.

A little background on me... I am a UNIX Administrator.
To make a connection... Android is a LINUX based OS, so I am very familiar with how it works.

So to get on with it....

The 70 - 80+ application limit most of you are talking about is somewhat important... What is really happening is MEMORY Consumption. After talking with Sprint, I was told the HERO has 512Mb on board RAM/memory. Applications are only installed on this space (NOT the SD-CARD) The exception to that are applications that store data... like a NOTE APP which will install the app on the 512Mb internal memory, but store the NOTEs you create on the SD-CARD (in most cases).

So what is happening is for every application installed, Each app has a memory requirement for the app to load and operate. Somewhere around 70th - 80th app you install, you are maxing out the 512Mb of memory. So the OS (operating system) becomes unstable, sluggish, corrupt, force closing a lot of things. Once you uninstall enough apps... only then will there be FREE memory for things to start working right again. For me, the breaking point was installing Guitar Hero for Android (7.4Mb in size)... The other issue I think is related to some apps having memory leaks (due to developers not coding to the best of their ability) or applications that do not properly close when you exit them and end up running wild in the background (this can be seen from a task manager app).

When you dial someone's number... each digit is stored into memory... when you create a new calendar entry... it requires more memory to store it... so on and so on...

You can think of it like this too.... (For the window users out there....) The more programs you install, the more memory the computer requires. If you don't add memory, the computer will become sluggish, slow, no-responsive. The remedy is easy with windows... you just add more memory.

As for the HERO... it is bound to 512Mb of internal memory so you have to watch your app count and memory/process usage. If future releases of Android... hopefully we will see an update that allows for a configurable option to use some of the SD card memory for process (aka SWAP space in the LINUX/UNIX world). Usually having 1Gb of swap space would make the Android run very fast all the time.

...so hopefully that clears up some of the issue or at least lets you understand what is causing it.

BTW: I do not frequent this site... just wanted to give my opinion on the matter since I experienced the issue firsthand. So if I do not chime back in... it's because I haven't logged into the site in a while. -Ben

 

[ohmarni]

No disrespect intended, but I don't believe that's what's happening. I've had three Android devices. This is unique to the Sprint Hero. My G1 never had this issue. My myTouch never had this issue. Also, my phone is rooted, I'm running apps off the SD card and I have a Linux swap partition for memory. My phone is really fast, not sluggish in the least. Also, I have plenty of memory left. The phone errors if I install 71 apps, no matter what the apps are, but it's fine if I don't go over 70. And it's fine until I reboot. Once I reboot, I just buckle up for my quick trip to hell. I've resorted to using the backup app for rooted phones. I do a nandroid restore to my only-70-apps-installed state, then I run the backup app to restore all the apps when I reboot. It's a pain in the butt, but it works.

 

[kronium]

No disrespect intended, but I don't believe that's what's happening. I've had three Android devices. This is unique to the Sprint Hero. My G1 never had this issue. My myTouch never had this issue. Also, my phone is rooted, I'm running apps off the SD card and I have a Linux swap partition for memory. My phone is really fast, not sluggish in the least. Also, I have plenty of memory left. The phone errors if I install 71 apps, no matter what the apps are, but it's fine if I don't go over 70. And it's fine until I reboot. Once I reboot, I just buckle up for my quick trip to hell. I've resorted to using the backup app for rooted phones. I do a nandroid restore to my only-70-apps-installed state, then I run the backup app to restore all the apps when I reboot. It's a pain in the butt, but it works.

Ohmarni, do you realize you can just uninstall that 71st app and everything is fine again?

 

[ohmarni]

Ohmarni, do you realize you can just uninstall that 71st app and everything is fine again?

Oh yes, I realize that. This is my method for restoring all 100+ apps should I need to reboot. I was mostly stating why I don't believe this to be a memory issue.

 

[fireheadman]

No disrespect intended, but I don't believe that's what's happening. I've had three Android devices. This is unique to the Sprint Hero. My G1 never had this issue. My myTouch never had this issue. Also, my phone is rooted, I'm running apps off the SD card and I have a Linux swap partition for memory. My phone is really fast, not sluggish in the least. Also, I have plenty of memory left. The phone errors if I install 71 apps, no matter what the apps are, but it's fine if I don't go over 70. And it's fine until I reboot. Once I reboot, I just buckle up for my quick trip to hell. I've resorted to using the backup app for rooted phones. I do a nandroid restore to my only-70-apps-installed state, then I run the backup app to restore all the apps when I reboot. It's a pain in the butt, but it works.

None taken,
But I would like to point out a couple things you mentioned:

1) you are rooted, so it is able to perform outside the intended operations (not a bad thing at all!)... actually I would like to know more about this if you have some time to go over it. PM me if you have some time.

2) you have an external swap space defined, which allows the OS to have an increased memory for running processes.... I am interested in this very much!

Previously I said the HERO had 512Mb... I stand corrected on this. I installed an app today called "System Monitor" from the market (its free). This app reports 192Mb of memory of which an average of 160Mb - 185Mb are in use. I currently have 96 apps installed on my phone (I only counted the apps that are listed in the app menu, so that includes base apps and ones that I have downloaded/installed)... NOTE: When my phone crashed last night, I had to uninstall about 7 apps is order for it to start working again.... so I am well over the 70 - 80 limit. Even at 96 apps installed, my phone is not sluggish right now... very responsive.

So what I mean by memory consumption is..... some apps do not require a lot of memory to run, maybe like 1 - 3Kb while other apps might need 1 - 5Mb and more in order to run. Then you have apps, which are not well designed that have memory leaks, so they keep consuming more and more memory... Usually when a process is complete, the program controlling the process will kill the process to release the memory block. If it has a memory leak, it will not release it, but just not call on it anymore.... Also known as a "defunct" or "zombie" or "runaway" process.

Ever see the older versions Internet Exploder start over consuming memory when you had a ton of tabs open... then you close most of them... only to find it did close the tabs, but it never released the memory blocks back to the free pool... then in Task Manager you saw a +700K chunk running as iexplorer.exe? That's a memory leak.

Some developers just get lazy or are not aware of what is going on.


On the flip side.... I support your opinion on the HERO having it's own issues. It is hard for a app developer to create a program that will be tailor-made to run perfect on every piece of hardware... even though Android is "supposed" to be able to run fine on pretty much anything.

... So let me know if you are interested in going over rooting and swap on the SD Card.

-Ben

 

[paleodust]

I have the same problem with my HTC Droid Eris. I installed all the apps that sounded the slightest bit interesting the first day I got the phone, which led to this exact problem. I did a factory reset and the symptoms went away.

I just experienced it a second time today and, just as I was about to run over to the Verizon store and ask for a replacement, I decided to do some research and ended up here.

I had a total of 112 apps after adding a few more last night and this morning. Low and behold, after uninstalling a few and a reboot, it was working again. There's definitely something to this.

Thanks for the help!

I hope they come up with a solution to this problem. With so many fun and interesting apps floating around, it's too bad we have to limit our app consumption.

 

[djpatjames]

Anyone have any updates on this? I love how the hero is advertised to have thousands of apps...but will crash with more than 70. This happened to me last night...which of course made me lose sleep...because I had not gotten insurance on the phone...yet. I hope this gets fixed.

 

[rsbenedict]

I don't think that 70 is the magic number. I have 103, but 104 will cause it to crash. I think it has to do with how big the app is. I could be wrong. I only have anecdotal evidence, but the do need to fix this asap!

 

[ohmarni]

Anyone have any updates on this? I love how the hero is advertised to have thousands of apps...but will crash with more than 70. This happened to me last night...which of course made me lose sleep...because I had not gotten insurance on the phone...yet. I hope this gets fixed.

Sprint has officially announced that we'll be getting an update to 2.1. Since HTC is aware of the issue, I'm sure they're going to fix this in that update. (Fingers crossed...toes too)

 

[ohmarni]

As I posted before, I don't think this is happening on the GSM version of this phone. I haven't read about it for the Tattoo or the Eris either, but I think both of those are running the 1.6 Android version and not 1.5 as with the Sprint Hero. In order to make 1.5 work for CDMA, HTC had to further extend their own framework. This is a good place to start looking and I certainly hope that they thoroughly test the 2.1 update to keep from having these issues.

Ok. I found what I consider to be supporting claims for this half-cocked theory of mine. Over at HTC Wiki, someone posted that the CDMA radio craps out. I know that HTC had to modify the 1.5 framework to get CDMA to work on the Hero as CDMA was not supported until 1.6. My guess is they screwed something up when they did it. If that's the case, then maybe the 2.1 update will fix this irritating bug.

 

[ohmarni]

I have the same problem with my HTC Droid Eris. I installed all the apps that sounded the slightest bit interesting the first day I got the phone, which led to this exact problem. I did a factory reset and the symptoms went away.

I was wrong about the Eris having the 1.6 framework as its base. It is 1.5. My guess is it's the same issue. I know Eris is supposed to get an update, too. Hopefully, that update will fix this issue for you.

 

[chinochino360]

Sorry to jump in like a ****, but does anybody know how much internal memory should be left alone or (free) before the hero slows down?
This is my first android, i had been under the impression that if apps. were backd up to sd. and install em' back from the card they would not affect internal mem. but i just read that not to be the case, LIKE I SAID FIRST ANDROID still learning

 

[Sweed]

Sorry to jump in like a ****, but does anybody know how much internal memory should be left alone or (free) before the hero slows down?
This is my first android, i had been under the impression that if apps. were backd up to sd. and install em' back from the card they would not affect internal mem. but i just read that not to be the case, LIKE I SAID FIRST ANDROID still learning

I'm not exactly sure, but on the G1 it was about 20megabytes.
although the g1 didn't have htc sense, and when you downloaded too much stuff on the G1, you wouldn't see too much problems, just a ton of lag, maybe some force closes.

 

[oggg]

No disrespect intended, but I don't believe that's what's happening. I've had three Android devices. This is unique to the Sprint Hero. My G1 never had this issue. My myTouch never had this issue. Also, my phone is rooted, I'm running apps off the SD card and I have a Linux swap partition for memory. My phone is really fast, not sluggish in the least. Also, I have plenty of memory left. The phone errors if I install 71 apps, no matter what the apps are, but it's fine if I don't go over 70. And it's fine until I reboot. Once I reboot, I just buckle up for my quick trip to hell. I've resorted to using the backup app for rooted phones. I do a nandroid restore to my only-70-apps-installed state, then I run the backup app to restore all the apps when I reboot. It's a pain in the butt, but it works.

I was ready to go ahead and root my phone until I read your post....so rooting the phone still doesn't solve the problem!?
that's a boomer!

 

[illogic6]

I have 100 apps installed on my Hero. I am running Modaco 1.3a unofficial ROM with Apps2SD. I just rebooted and I'm having no problem. I've been running this way for some time now.

 

[oggg]

I have 100 apps installed on my Hero. I am running Modaco 1.3a unofficial ROM with Apps2SD. I just rebooted and I'm having no problem. I've been running this way for some time now.

did you have the problem before rooting?

 

[illogic6]

did you have the problem before rooting?

As soon as I got the phone, I rooted it. Unsure.

After flashing this ROM, I removed a good amount of the stock apps. (ie NFL, Nascar, Amazon MP3, Exchange Mail App & Widget)

Wonder if that has something to do with it.

 

[oggg]

most people who come to this thread have the problem in their phone. However, there are several people who probably have more than 70, or even 100 apps on their phone who are not experiencing such an issue in their Hero.

The question is: is this problem related to a certain production batch or something?

I bought my hero on the first day of sale at BestBuy. It does not have the "Google" logo on the back of the phone...

I will probably try to root the phone later on to see if it takes care of the problem...

 

[illogic6]

My phone is still showing 110 meg of free internal memory. I also have some apps that normally open upon startup disabled.

My phone does not have the Google logo either.

 

[dpeeps74]

i'm having a similar problem to this, but not sure on the number of apps i have installed. my phone actually does the whole crash on reboot everytime i install any battery widget, even the HTC one. same thing though, anytime i install a bunch of apps and reboot....force close occurs on pretty much every app and widget

 

[illogic6]

Figured I should update you guys on this. I rebooted my phone yesterday and was met with all kinds of force closes out of nowhere. I hadn't done much out of the ordinary yesterday, so I'm thinking I was just experiencing this bug.

Really stinks... Hope 2.1 fixes this.

 

[oggg]

I ended up rooting my phone and partitioning my sd for apps2sd. I am using Fresh 1.1 ROM. 84 apps installed and working smoothly so far.