I've taken over maintenance of an Android app, and there are a few residual problems that I've more or less fixed, but still have issues because of different Android OS versions.
For example, sending a web request with the MediaPlayer class has custom HTTP headers stripped by the OS before the request is sent out, but only on Android 4.X (I exhaustively tested), and that causes this particular feature to fail because it relies on those headers.
This is a known issue and I'm trying to work around it, but would it be a good idea to have a conditional check like
if (OS.VERSION == 4) {
knownIssueDialog(This feature will not work on your Android version... etc.");
}
Obviously we would have this noted on our support channel, but I'm wondering if it would be a good idea (assuming everything is kept track of) to have these known issues also embedded in software, and to present them when and where necessary, such as what I described above.
We keep getting multiple bad reviews and a lot of support emails based on these kinds of issues, so in my mind it would save everyone a lot of time and headache by simply blocking a feature where it is known not to work properly.
I see two potential problems:
- Users have probably never seen anything like a "known issue" dialog before; a lot of users simply might not understand what it means.
- There is a bit of development overhead - one would need to make sure to keep track of these issues somewhere in the code. Fortunately, with Java annotations, any conditional check like that could be preceded by
@KnownIssue
or something like that, making finding/modifying them very simple.
Would putting 'known issue' prompts in software make sense?
Edit: I'll add that this is an issue that just started occurring about a week ago. I have half-fixed the issue, and am very unlikely to be able to fix it for 4.X because it's the OS that is causing the problem. I could release a new version with the fix and make 50% of the user base happy again, and warn the other 50% (4.X users) that the issue will persist on 4.X, and to suggest an upgrade (or something). The question is whether or not to do that in software (i.e. show a dialog to 4.X users), or to just let them spam us support emails saying "your fix didn't work!!!" and then direct them to the support page that discusses the issue in further detail.