Ksetyadi's [B]Log

This morning, I was shocked. Not literally of course. I can’t run the application widget on my Android. The system said, “com.google.settings has stopped unexpectedly…” and you might guess, the famous force close finally run its duty. What’s wrong?

I suspected that I have installed application which cause the widget to break so fast. Driven by curiosity, I traced it using aLogCat and found that there’s a NullPointerException (NPE) logged in the system along with the filename (I don’t remember the filename, I think it’s something like AppWidgetSomething.java) and the line where the NPE happen.

I remembered the last time I was installing Koprol for Android with widget enabled and I thought that was the problem why the system widgets were broken. I uninstalled it and nothing happened. I restart the phone. The widget seems untouched. NPE still happen on the same file with the same line. I’m searching a little bit about this problem and most of the solution is just resetting the phone to the factory settings. Well.. what!? Reset.. oh no, they must be kidding. It means that I should install all the applications, yes, ALL, from the beginning. I avoid that kind of solution and prefer had a broken widget with every apps running smoothly. But then, I still curious why there wasn’t any simple solution that works.

My curiosity then lead me to a not-so-crazy ideas. If resetting the phone solve the problem, why not trying to uninstalling the most updated apps one by one and see if that works. So I pick a pen and paper and write down all the apps I’ve installed in and create a new list of the apps I’m going to uninstall so I can trace the problem one by one. It’s just the same as resetting to factory settings but the difference is, while resetting the phone solve the problem without knowing where the problem is, uninstalling one by one give me a chance or two to know where the real problem is.

Lucky me, I just need to take down 4 apps at most before I arrived at the Google Maps updates. I uninstall the Google Maps updates and restart the phone. (If you ask me whether I was restarting the phone after I’ve successfully uninstalled one app, the answer is yes). I go to the home screen and, surprisingly, the system widgets now works like a charm!

Well, Google, I know it’s hard to be an engineer, especially when we’re working with Android. We have to deal with a lot of manufacturers which are not very similar in manufacturing their product (and hardware). So please, if you read this, release a worldwide standard requirements for your manufacturers so they can’t easily changed the way Android works. Additional is okay but reduction should be reviewed. That’s all I can say.

Oh, by the way, I’m using the cheaper version of Android. Samsung Galaxy 5 running Eclair. It’s a very old phone, isn’t it? :)