I have made an app with live tile for windows phone 8. The tile is programmed to refresh every 30 seconds. When the run the app in the emulator or when I deploy the app in my cell (Lumia 920) the tile works fine. But surprisingly when I downloaded the same app from the market and run it on the same device the tile doesn't update.
I did quite a bit of research on this problem and found that a similar problem is observed by many other people which can be found here.
Kindly tell me what is going wrong.
Extra Info : I have tried resizing the tile, pin and unpin the tile and hard reset. I have also tried changing the refresh period (initially the refresh period was 5 seconds). I have also checked that the background task is allowed for the app.
Thanks,
Apurva Pathak
Background agents have certain limitations, as listed below.
Background tasks can minimally be run every 30 minutes. There is a debug-only API to run them more regularly, but this is not available for released apps.
Some low power devices do not support background agents
Background tasks are limited by number on each device and can be enabled or disabled from application settings.
They do not work when power saver mode is activated.
As Mahantesh correctly pointed out your tiles work when you deploy the application because the ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest() is allowed to run for a 60 seconds period for debugging and testing purposes ONLY.
Therefore this method cannot be called and it wont work with a time limit less than 30 minutes if the application is published to the market and users download it from there.
Related
I have made a IoT beacon reading app. I am using DispatchTimer to get signal for 10 sec then processing it to retrieve some result. Everything is working fine if app is not minimized. but when app is minimized or I work on some other thing then App is not working at all. I have handle App suspended event but still on minimizing the app I am not able show the result.
To keep your app running when minimized, you need to create an ExtendedExecutionSession in your app. Read more details here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt590969.aspx
Thanks,
Stefan Wick - Windows Developer Platform
I've seen claims on the net that the newly released iOS 7.1's iBeacon support.
Specifically:
The system is supposed to still notify your app about
didEnterRegion/didExitRegion events, even if the user explicitly
kills your app.
didEnterRegion/didExitRegion notifications are
supposed to be faster from the background and/or with the device
locked.
I have not been able to confirm either of these claims with my own testing. In fact, I seem to be less likely to get didEnterRegion/didExitRegion notifications from a locked device. (more accurately I seem to get didEnterRegion notices, but not didExitRegion notices). That could be because Apple made me remove my BLE background mode entries in my info.plist - I'm not completely sure. I'm still trying to sort this out.
I had trouble setting up my tests at first, but I have witnessed background region entry callbacks after killing an app in iOS 7.1 on both iPhone 4s and iPhone 5s models. See comments below for testing details and instructions to reproduce.
I have also done tests on background detection times on an iPhone 4S, and I still see delays of 15 minutes on iOS 7.1. My full test results and methodology are described here.
Finally, I have also done some tests on the fluctuations on the "accuracy" (distance in meters) measurement on the same device before and after the upgrade to iOS 7.1. I do not see an obvious difference in the noise on the estimate. The graphs below show results before and after the upgrade, with an iBeacon 0.5 meters away for 60 seconds then moved to 3 meters away for 60 seconds. In both cases, the transmitter was a properly calibrated iPhone 4S w/ iOS 7.1 and the receiver was an iPhone 5S.
iOS 7.0.6 Estimated distance
iOS 7.1 Estimated distance
As has been mentioned in several articles circulating around the internet, beacon sensing is available even when you swipe your app away from the multi-tasking view. However in my experiments, a region enter/exit event doesn't call the didDetermineState: directly (Probably because I hadn't been using the AppDelegate to initiate any beacon sensing but instead triggering monitoring based on UI events). Instead if you have registered for Background Location Updates, your AppDelegate's didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: method would get called with the value for key UIApplicationLaunchOptionsLocationKey in the parameter launchOptions set.
You can do a simple check like this to test if this is indeed a location update that has bought your app into the background to perform some task.
if ([launchOptions objectForKey:UIApplicationLaunchOptionsLocationKey])
You can then either register your monitored regions again or start ranging immediately.
P.S. CLLocationManager retains your previously monitoredRegions on app restore but without starting monitoring again using the same UUID and identity, you would not get the enter/exit region event in CLLocationManagerDelegate (which had brought your back up to life)
David has done some wonderful work on this, so I'm writing this cautiously... but I'm seeing something quite different from him in my tests.
I'm using two phones: an iPhone 4S running iOS 7.1 (11D167) and an iPhone 5S running iOS 7.0.6 (11B651). My iBeacons are manufactured and sold by Bluecats (www.bluecats.com), although I'm not yet using their SDK (ie. I'm just using CoreLocation) and I don't think the manufacturer makes much difference.
I'm getting response times of around 1-2 seconds on both devices when the app is running in the foreground and also when running in the background. The only difference is when I remove the app from the app switcher: iOS 7.0.6 never responds (or perhaps will do in 15 minutes), but iOS 7.1 responds in roughly the same time. When I say "respond", I mean that the CLLocationManager's locationManager:didDetermineState:forRegion: delegate is called by iOS.
I'm testing by actually wandering around my office with phones in hand, so I'm physically moving in and out of range. Strangely (?), in my early testing, where I was sitting at my desk and simulating moving in and out of range by removing and reinserting batteries, I was seeing much slower response times. Perhaps this is part of the difference?
In my testing I have seen the presence of a beacon go un-noticed by an app for up to 15 minutes, but I found something that's interesting. I'm using RedBearLabs mini BTLE sensors as ibeacons and their app to program the beacons, http://redbearlab.com/ibeacon/ (http://redbearlab.com/s/MiniBeacon_v1.zip), seems to have an something in it that immediately starts a scan / update of beacons. If I start a beacon up, and in my app it goes unnoticed, by starting then quitting the MiniBeacon app my app immediately notifies me that there are new beacons. This is the same result when entering or exiting. Their app uses CBCentralManager, which my app doesn't, so maybe a mixture between CBCentralManager and CLBeaconRegion is the way to go? I imagine CLBeaconRegion starts / restarts the bluetooth radio, so maybe that is the reason for this. Just taking a stab at it in hopes that someone with a more complete understanding can help resolve this.
Thanks
My testing also reproduces 15 mins to start scanning when my app is in background mode on iOS7.1.1. Just a bit curious, I have seen quite many youtube videos from different companies showing the app has been waken from background mode as soon as they approach their beacons. Is it sales trick?
I am Working on Background task in Windows phone application but it is not calling .When do launch for test it is working but in real scenario app is not calling background services.
Do you use ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest? This function is not supposed to work on a real phone. You have to deal with the fact that instead of running every 1-2 minutes your background task will be launched once every 30 minutes or so as stated in Constraints For Periodic Agents section.
If everything is fine in your simulator, you have to cross your fingers and keep waiting for a half of hour or so just to test that you are actually launched. Yes, it's a pain to debug, but we have no other official way.
You may also try adjusting local time on device. Sometimes going half an hour into the future helps trigger background agent immediately.
I am trying to develop a simple calendar app with a live tile but in battery saver mode the background agent won't run and I can't have the live tile updated with the current day and day of week.
I noticed that the Calendar (1st party app) does not suffer from this problem even in Battery Saver mode.
Does it get special attention / capabilities being a first party app or there is some trick that I don't know (yet)?
The built-in (or system) apps are not restrained in the same way that 3rd party apps are. There are many examples of this on Windows Phone but two visible ones are...
The calendar app updating its Live Tile even when Battery Saver is turned on (which you noted).
The People Hub Live Tile which has many small tiles which rotate in sequence - as developers, we don't have access to that Live Tile Template.
The Photos Hub Live Tile displays photos using a panning animation - also not available to developers.
As there is no 'fix' if your PeriodicTask doesn't run as expected, you'll simply have to update the tile when your app runs as well as checking the status of the PeriodicTask each time.
Is it possible to create an app the runs in the background? If so is there any samples out there for this?
In Windows Phone OS 7.1 you can actually use Background Agents now to perform tasks in the background.
from MSDN:
Scheduled Tasks and background agents allow an application to execute
code in the background, even when the application is not running in
the foreground. The different types of Scheduled Tasks are designed
for different types of background processing scenarios and therefore
have different behaviors and constraints.
You can use a PeriodicTask or ResourceIntensiveTasks. Read more about it in the MSDN article above.
And here's some sample code for you to integrate background agents into your existing app.
Sample Code: Background Agents in Mango
An application in the foreground can continue to run when the phone screen is locked(not background but...) by setting the PhoneApplicationService.ApplicationIdleDetectionMode property. By setting up your application to run when the phone screen is locked, a user is able to access the application quickly upon unlock. However, when your application runs under a locked screen, it could consume power outside of the user's control. For this reason, your application must minimize power usage when running under a locked screen
At the moment there is no way to create application that runs in background.
True multitasking for 3rd party Windows Phone 7 apps will come as an OS upgrade later this year. However, unless the app has to absolutely run in the background (like Pandora etc.), we as developers share some responsibility in making our apps feel at home with the rest of the OS.
Windows Phone OS offers app developers chances to save state of their applications to give the end users the feeling that it never stopped running; this is essentially the same as in other mobile platforms. As your app is being deactivated/closed, you have the option to "Tombstone" your state so that your users can come back to just where they left with BackStack navigation or future launches. Channel 9 had a nice set of demos & labs around tombstoning, found here.
Hope this helps!