I am nearing completion of a contract to develop an Android app, but am being held up by a devastating bug that only seems to occur on the client phone. It appears that after a certain amount of usage, every time the client opens the app -- before they can even get past the login screen -- it "resets the phone", which I take to mean dumping to the home screen. He says it does NOT give the usual "Application was forced to close" message.
Uninstalling and reinstalling the app does not seem to help, so I am assuming it cannot be anything with my ContentProvider class's database. Reformatting his phone fixes the problem, but it is starting to look like that is only a temporary fix.
There is not much happening at the login screen. It is accessing a SQLite database via a ContentProvider, it is displaying a TabHost which is currently tabbed to a ListActivity (but the list is empty until you login), and an AlertDialog asking for login credentials is displayed on top of that. There may be some GPS activity -- that is one of the only remaining dev tasks on this contract, is that the app is currently a bit promiscuous about when it uses the GPS. Other than that, nothing really happening. The client reports that as soon as he tries to type in the AlertDialog, that's when the "phone resets".
I know this is vague, so I know getting a clear answer is a long shot. I am new to Android development, so I'm hoping it will be some simple and common gotcha, like "Oh yeah, there's some kind of debug logging that is on by default, you have to turn that off for production or else your log fills up."
EDIT: Oh yeah, the client is six hours away, and driving there is most definitely not in the budget -- so that's why I don't know much about the symptoms.
EDIT #2: On further Googling... I am thinking now it is relevant to mention that the client is using a Hero phone. I'm finding all kinds of links complaining about 3rd-party apps that use the GPS not always working on Hero. But there seem to be as many fixes as there are links! Is there an "official" fix for this problem?