Roon app on iPhone (iOS 13.1.2) crashes

Excellent news, I’ll mark this topic as solved with 13.2.3 iOS.
If you trouble sparks up again just ping me and I’ll re-open.

Topic reopened.

This topic was automatically closed 36 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Unusable. Gets into a crashy mode and it’s just impossible. Latest everything here, don’t ask me, it doesn’t matter. And it’s not like any of the other apps are crashy, Roon is the sole shitshow on my phone. Jeez.

It crashes every 30 seconds on my phone. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. 30 seconds in it gave me a pop up about not having Roon backed up. After that it crashes every 30 seconds. It doesn’t crash on my wife’s iPhone at all.

There are likely tens of thousands iOS installs of Roon app out there that does NOT crash repeatedly, so you could be a bit helpful and tell what kind of phone, ios version and connectivity your are seeing this in?

1 Like

Hi @miguelito,

You previously mentioned that things had become stable on a previous iOS version:

Did this change after another iOS update?

Does a reboot of the phone resolve things, at least for some time?

Hard to tell. Up until now, Roon on 13.3 was stable but not anymore. I usually use Roon on my iPad, so don’t use the iPhone version all that often. Roon on 13.3 on iPad pro has no such issues thus far.

No iOS update, latest Roon app available. I have the impression it might be some cache or similar that gets too big and iOS starts killing what looks like a runaway process? Just a wild guess.

Have you tried resetting the cache in Roon on the iPhone?

Settings, Setup, Clear Cache. Try a lower Memory for Photos/Artwork value?

I haven’t tried that. But I did previously tried deleting the app and reinstalling which would have effectively cleared the cache and when I tried that it did not help the crashy behaviour. This was with a previous version of iOS.

Ultimately, whatever the reason, the blame lies on Roon’s side. Yes it is possible that iOS is more stringent or there are API changes or what-have-you. But the reality is I use a lot of apps and none have this crashy behaviour.

Well, it’s worth a try. Uninstalling doesn’t guarantee the cache files were deleted and it’s easy enough to try.

From 30 years of managing complex networks and the applications that run on them, assigning blame with software issues rarely helps developers find solutions.

I don’t doubt your frustrations but I’ve not experienced any crashes on my iPhone but have on two old iPads. After 2 days or so the app just quits. I have found that by starting with a clean db (yes, wiping everything and starting over about each year) I experience more stability and performance with control points.

If you’re willing and capable, try shutting down Core, rename the db folder and start it back up. It will have to reingest all your music, etc. but it could be the source of the problem.

If it doesn’t help, simply reverse and put the original db back.

Didn’t see whether you had done a hard restart on iPhone to clear all the idle apps.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Roon app on iPhone (iOS 13.4.1 crashes

In my case EVERY FRIGGING VERSION OF IOS 13. I’ve said this so many times…

I’ve had a strange behavior where it is ok for some time but then at some point it starts crashing all the time. It won’t last on longer than a minute. As I said many times before, this is only the case on the iPhone, not the iPad, on EVERY version of iOS 13. I am on an iPhone XS Max 512GB, as I detailed many times before, and have gone through every release version of iOS 13 (ie don’t do betas).

Roon Support: This is pretty pathetic performance from you guys.

Ask Apple for help fgs!

I’ve asked the team to make sure this investigation gets some attention @miguelito. I know the support and QA team have brought this to engineering in the past, but progress has been slow going.

I’m sure you know these are always the trickiest issues to debug – a relatively tiny number of reports, and an inconsistent failure mode with no steps.

There were hundreds of thousands of Roon sessions on iOS last week and based on this thread the issues seems to be affecting maybe 15 users over and over again. Because this seems tied to certain devices/environments, the chances of us being able to reproduce this problem in a controlled environment or deliver a clear bug report to Apple are much lower.

That’s not to say we won’t be able to make progress on this. I understand the frustration and I’m going to make sure @dylan and @support do what they can to expedite this and get it actionable for the team.


@miguelito you’re not seeing anything like this right?


For everyone else who’s reported this issue (@TuliaNonTroppo, @Steve_Kalkwarf, @KDZ )

If you are able to notice any pattern about what happens before things get unstable, or what kinds of steps get things stable again (killing other apps, restarting the app, clearing cache, killing app data, restarting iOS device/router/core/access point, etc) please let us know – the faster we can understand and reproduce this issue, the faster we can make progress.

We appreciate everyone’s patience.

It still happens for me on occasion. The last time it did about a week or so ago, I restarted my phone and it stopped happening. I will update this when it happens again to you have a time signature.

1 Like

I Mike,
I do not have this crashing problems anymore.
But I’m on iOS 13.4 now, on my iPhone X and my iPad mini 5 .
Best,

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?