Roon app on iPhone (iOS 13.1.2) crashes

Yes, I completely understand this of course, especially in a situation where it is hard to reproduce.

For completeness I will state a few facts that seem to be clear:

1- Roon logs (which you enabled on my account) do not show any Roon error, just sudden death of the process. It seems to me this means iOS is somehow determining your process has violated some rules and kills it. This has been the case with ALL versions of iOS 13 (and I don’t do betas), so it seems like some new safeguard that started with this version of iOS.

2- The problem does not show up in iPadOS, which is pretty stable. And by and large it seems to me that no major OS core feature is different between iOS and iPadOS, so it seems to me that what is triggering the kill is something in the branch of the code in Roon app that pertains the iPhone.

3- The iPhone app is very stable until it reaches a point where it starts crashing ALL the time. It won’t stay up more than a minute in this state. So I am thinking there’s got to be some cache that is getting out of bounds, or something that is building up and then making it crash, and PERSISTS over sessions.

4- I have not identified what conditions make it come back to stable. It has not been deleting the app and reinstalling, and I don’t know if there are any caches that persist in that situation (I doubt it).

5- I don’t really have anything particularly strange I run on any of these devices. And I have plenty of memory - my iPad is an iPad Pro 10.5" with 512GB, and my iPhone an XS Max with 512GB also, both have ~100GB free, and both have very similar apps installed and usage patterns. And both have been updated to the latest iOS/iPadOS versions as they come out (no betas).

6- One more bit: the iPhone app has crashed on me without any interaction meaning I started it (after a crash), it was loading, and without me touching the screen at all it would suddenly crash. So it doesn’t seem to be something related to interactions and GUI per-se, but something related to whatever resources it is using from the OS that makes the OS decide to kill it.

Guys: I understand the complexity of troubleshooting issues like this, especially when they are related to some form of cross-session buildup. It is also my understanding Xcode cannot really maintain OS states across sessions which makes this particularly hard to troubleshoot.

However, I can also tell you I use many apps in iOS and iPadOS and none have ever had this kind of issues.

Have you contacted Apple for help?

Same problem, but i didn’t notice it when playing songs from a playlist via my ripped music on a server. Once my playlist was done, roon started pulling songs from Qobuz (I’m not logged into tidal). After that, only then did roon start quick crashing.

I’m also seeing this. I wish I had anything useful to report. It was fine all day, and browsed to an album and it won’t stop crashing. The iPad app is fine. It doesn’t seem to be crashing, but is instead throwing me to the home menu, as it appears in the app switcher. This is on an iPhone 11 Pro Max running 13.3.1.

Local files or Quboz makes no difference in what’s playing.

I would expect it now crashes with all sources, local or streamed. I don’t think this has anything to do with the source, it is an issue in iOS with something getting to an extreme state, that persists across sessions, and that is making the OS kill the Roon process in the phone.

I also found that rebooting the phone provides some relief. Eventually though, the problem occurs again.

Hello All,

We have been discussing this issue internally with QA further and at this time, we believe that this issue may be due to the Roon iOS app running out of RAM and then getting forcibly closed by the iOS system manager.

To investigate this theory further, could you please use the instructions listed in this article to access the console logs on your iPhone, reproduce the issue and upload a set to Google Drive / Dropbox and post a link here?

Thank you!

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I see this issue pretty often as well, friends. I also know how difficult it is to debug these sorts of issues. I so far have seen no pattern in what causes the crashes. I do have a couple of ideas, though:

  1. Would it be possible to temporarily disable all images from the core? It would be interesting to see if the app performance changes in reaction. That would help confirm the RAM suspicion.

  2. What technologies does the iOS app use? It looks a little WebKit-ish / react-native-ish. If you’re making heavy use of native web views or react bridge, we may be looking at the wrong logs… I have a couple contacts on the WebKit team at Apple. Let me know if you want me to install a special TestFlight build to help debug.

Love Roon. Keep it up, team! Happy to help.

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Hi all,
The Roon iOS iPhone app started crashing again starting this morning.

iOS 13.4.1
iPhone Xr

I noticed it at around 8:10am PST US

It crashes approximately 25 seconds after opening. This happened three times in a row.

I have had to delete the app and reinstall it twice in the past couple weeks for different reasons than crashing, so it is a pretty new install (within the week).

Hope this helps! But as of right now it is too unstable to use (again).

Hi @TuliaNonTroppo / @David_Hariri,

We’re still troubleshooting this issue and we’d like to see if we can narrow this down.
We have heard from another user that this behavior might be related to the image cache on the iPhone and the length of the play queue.

Can I please ask both of you to try clearing your current play queue on the iOS device (in the Roon app) and clear the image cache under Roon Settings -> Setup -> Clear Image Cache and let me know if that stops the crashes?

Sure. FYI, an iPhone restart stopped the crashes this time around. I will clear caches now and see when it happens again.

I had tried that in the past. No diff.

Crashing again this morning. ~30 seconds again.

I tried clearing cache and upcoming queue. No change.

I noticed the last time it was crashing was seven days ago in the morning. So far that is the only pattern I see.

A phone restart seems to have resolved it this time.

I look forward to a fix, as your product is the only reason I need to restart my phone to keep it working.

Crashing again. Same 30 seconds. Didn’t happen this morning and just started happening at around 9:27am

Software 13.5 (17F75)

Clearing image cache didn’t help. Restarting my phone did.

I am also having the same issues. We’re now in June 28 and this topic is still hot.
I’m still on a trial period, so If Roon can’t find a solution how can i subscribe to it after my last 5 days come to an end ?
I’m using iPhone X with latest iOS versions and latest MAC OS.

Do you have any other device to use to control your Roon core until this gets resolved?

No not really. Using mainly a USB Audio cable connected to my sound =
system it makes it not comfortable to move near my Macbook to change =
settings and playlists.

Crashing again. Same 30 seconds. Didn’t happen this morning and just started happening at around 11:10am

Software 13.5.1 (17F80)
Restarting my phone is my go to solution for this now. Looks like it has been about a month between crashes which is getting better!

Any news regarding this issue?
Still got 2 days left of trial and need to décide if i go for Audirvana or stay on Roon.

You should ask Noris. I’m just another customer here. Thanks.