Crash Report - total loss

[romanmw]

Things have been going splendidly on my new Apple iPad pro until this morning. I went to continue my bible study from the previous morning and Accordance refused to open. After restarting the ipad and stopping all processes it still would not open.

 

I deleted and re downloaded the app. I reinstalled all of my modules. The main problem was that for whatever reason my user notes are gone. The files so that they are there but they have no text. I have these set up to sync through Dropbox. I disconnected and reconnected dropbox to no avail. Luckily, I had just started using this feature with the purchase of a new iPad so I only lost a couple weeks of study notes BUT I now have a fear of trusting this system in the future.

 

Do the notes automatically sync once a link is set up in settings or do I have to force a sync every time I finish a study session?

 

 

Grace and Peace,

 

 

 

Michael Romans

[Chris Rockwell]

Hey Michael, 

 

Sorry to hear you lost your notes. We plan to allow automatically Dropbox Syncing in the future, but you will need to manually sync your notes after making changes for them to be maintained in Dropbox.

 

Chris 

[Scott Knapp]

Michael,

 

Next time you have a freeze or crash in the iOS app where it refuses to open, before reinstalling please try turning on the "Remove Saved Session" option in  the Accordance section of the iOS settings app first.  This option will tell the iOS app to clear the information (what views were open and what did they contain) that was saved automatically when you put the iOS app into the background or switched to another app on your device.  The next time you run the Accordance mobile app, it will removed this saved session data and will load a new search view with the first text module it finds installed.  This typically solves 99% of these types of problems.

 

With regards to Dropbox syncing, it is certainly under consideration to do the syncing automatically.   But it was a deliberate choice to make Dropbox syncing a manual operation when the feature was first introduced for several reasons.  First, we were worried about cellular data usage.  Any change made locally has to be uploaded to a user's remote Dropbox.  Because our user file formats (user notes, user tools, highlights) are "monolithic" in nature, a single edit of a note on a single verse would require the entire file to be uploaded to Dropbox.  And if the file in Dropbox already had changes made somewhere else (say in the desktop app or on another mobile device), the file would need to take a round trip.  Downloaded from Dropbox, local changes merged in, and then re-uploaded to Dropbox so it has the latest version.  A user who makes several changes over the course of the day to a large note file could incur significant data usage.

 

Another problem unique to the mobile app versus the desktop app is the reliability of a robust internet connection.  Because a mobile device might switch back and forth between WiFi and cellular connections, or have the cellular connection fade in and out, the amount of redundancy and robustness needed in an automatic syncing algorithm to make it reliable is quite high.  Even Dropbox, which for a while supported an automatic Syncing API on iOS, (introduced a couple of years after our implementation) has just deprecated it and it will no longer function by mid-next year.  Their reason was that it was too hard to maintain and developers are again on their own if they want to write automatic syncing algorithms around the new v2 Dropbox API.

 

I know users would like to see automatic syncing of user content when it changes.  But I hope users understand that mobile apps face a very different challenge than the desktop apps when it comes to the level of quality of service necessary for a robust and reliable implementation.

[aiwilliams]

This is shocking news about Dropbox syncing after 7 months of highlighting and note taking and a reinstalled Accordance to attempt to fix a never-ending splash screen spinner - I've lost it all. If the app cannot figure out a good time to sync content, with all those reasons listed here that make it complex, how is a user to decide or even remember to sync when every expectation of using the cloud is automatic safety!? I don't recall the app telling me I need to manage this complex decision.

[Chris Rockwell]

This is shocking news about Dropbox syncing after 7 months of highlighting and note taking and a reinstalled Accordance to attempt to fix a never-ending splash screen spinner - I've lost it all. If the app cannot figure out a good time to sync content, with all those reasons listed here that make it complex, how is a user to decide or even remember to sync when every expectation of using the cloud is automatic safety!? I don't recall the app telling me I need to manage this complex decision.

 

Sorry to hear lost all your notes and highlights. We actually illustrate our Dropbox syncing as a manual action in the tutorial screens and explain it in our Accordance Mobile Help files. However, we do plan to make Dropbox syncing a more obvious action and maybe even semi-automatic in the future. I would highly recommend reaching out to us before deleting and reinstalling the app in the future. We have several ways to get you back up in running without having to do so. Again I apologize for this setback.

 

Chris