Thursday, June 11, 2015

Issues with IBM Verse (Traveler) App

Feels a little weird being in here. Haven't blogged in a while.  Smells kind of musty. Better open a window.
There. That's better.
Hey kids, Andy here with a brand new blog update.  Seems that last week our pals over at IBM decided that the Traveler app for Android devices needed a new coat of paint and a shiny new name.  Yup, they went ahead and called the latest update to the app Verse (insert heavenly angelic chorus here).  That's all fine and good, but, soon after the update hit Google Play, people started hitting our Help Desk with issues that when they go to set up Verse, (insert heavenly angelic chorus here), and follow through the steps to put in their server information and credentials, they are given a white screen and nothing happens.  No mail synce, no Verse, (insert heavenly angelic chorus here), home screen....nothing.
We did find that if they remove the Verse, (insert heavenly angelic chorus here), app, install an older version of the Traveler app for the Android and configure that, they are able to connect.  We also saw that if the user had already had Traveler on their Android and updated to Verse, (insert heavenly angelic chorus here), then that worked just fine to. It was only fresh new installs that were having the problem of the white screen of death!  I reached out to IBM today and opened an ESR about it.  I heard back rather quickly that they are aware of the issue and sent me a link to a beta download of Verse, (it's old, not doing that anymore), and the new beta version was able to install on a fresh Android without any problems.  
Not sure if anyone else has seen this or not, but wanted to share because along with the Verse issues, we've also seen numerous issues with Samsung Verizon devices getting all boned up after a software upgrade from Verizon and we thought that the two issues were related.  For now our work around includes having the user completely remove the Verse app, emailing the old Traveler apk to their GMail account and having them set that up, then do the upgrade to Verse if they want.  The version of the troubled Verse client that we are seeing this on is
IBM Verse version 9.0.1.4
201506041639
I am waiting to hear back from IBM on when they are going to release the updated Verse app to the Google Play store and have not yet heard back.

Well, that's it for now. Back to other things.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's a reason why i always keep 2-3 older versions of any installed apps as apks locally on my Android devices. There are a number of tools in the app store that allow you to automate such backup procedures.
This is not limited to IBM. Many apps on iOS and Android screw up with their newer versions, changing the look&feel, breaking or removing features that used to work before, etc. Fortunately on Android it's quite easy to remove an app an install an earlier version.

Unknown said...

We've found a number of Android smartphones and tablets getting timeout errors after upgrading to the Verse client. In some cases, the initial sync never completes, causing customer complaints. It wouldn't be so bad if the timeout was occasional but in some cases it's permanent.

Our Traveler box is quite heavily loaded (single server / 1250 devices) but there's plenty of horse power on the system. We're downgrading affected devices to see if it improves things.

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