DockRunner problem

[roxito]

No, I am not the one misunderstanding. You are misunderstanding.

Whether the feature was officially supposed to work or not is irrelevant to the point I am making. The point is, for most Droid phones auto rotate worked (even if it was not supposed to) and it stopped working once DockRunner was installed. And this is NOT some random cosmic accident on hundreds (if not thousands) of Droids that this problem occurred immediately on installation of DockRunner (even if Motorola/Google is at fault). There is no "mistaking correlation with causation" here. It is a simple effect that can be reproduced.

Again... What I am really saying is this .... You should clearly state in the product description that the autorotate functionality is likely to stop working in case it is working curently.

People are entitled to know this before downloading your product, rather than having to find out the hard way by digging through long forum dicussions. Otherwise you are program is no different than a virus. Touting the greatness of your product without describing the known problems that it causes is plain cheating.

Many people like myself will simply never even try DockRunner if this problem was made clear up front. Because of your application I have wasted countless hours on the internet and on my phone trying to understand and fix the problem.

You are responsible for every Droid user who suffered .. as you withheld this information. You could avoid this responsibility in the future by making it clear in the product description... or by just withdrawing the product from the market.

 

[droppedd]

for most Droid phones auto rotate worked (even if it was not supposed to) and it stopped working once DockRunner was installed.

That's simply not true. I've personally received only a tiny handful of support emails claiming that DockRunner broke their "autorotating home," and on this thread I've only seen one person (you) actually saying a) they had autorotate and b) it stopped working right after DockRunner was installed. Motorola themselves say it doesn't work, and if it ever did, it was a fluke only a few people were experiencing incorrectly, so your claim that > 50% of users had working autorotate and that DockRunner screwed that up for > 50% of those users is just plain made up, or I'd have heard complaints from 25%+ of DockRunner users rather than .01% of DockRunner users (I calculated it out - really). And since I've been very open about what DockRunner does, it should be pretty obvious it doesn't do anything system-level beyond what the dock itself does.

I understand the Android OS permissions model isn't well understood by most users, so you may think I have access to some mystical low-level across-hard-reset settings, but I couldn't possibly change a system setting that would persist across a *full hard reset* - only firmware-level data and ROM does that. Claiming that DockRunner somehow does so is kind of ridiculous. If it was even possible, then it'd be a significant bug in Android to even allow such a thing.

And the final proof DockRunner isn't screwing this up? Try putting the phone in a car dock -- autorotated home works there. Take it out -- it goes back to being broken. Nothing to do with DockRunner, just Motorola's bizzarre decisions.

 

[steveninspokane]

Not sure if this will help, But when using Dockrunner, close out of program, and run dock runner again, that will bring it back to portrait.

 

[roxito]

I did not claim any % values on how many people are experiencing the problem. You are making them up. If you think only 0.01% of them are facing the problem because thats the number of people who reported it to you directly... then you are living under a rock. Very few really bother reporting and wasting time in debugging such issue. I found a many hits just by simple google search. On this very thread itself there others reporting the same problem. And there are other forums and threads where it is noted. Many simply read these posts and don't bother reporting considering it a well known problem.

Anyway you keep avoiding the main point .. that this should be stated clearly as a known possible issue in the product description. People like autorotate even if motorola or google never intended it to work.

Again.. your app may not be broken.. but it *can* unintentionally trigger a behavior which we do NOT like. We need to know this before using it.

 

[BurtB]

Have had my droid since Nov 7. Home screen rotate without keyboard out worked for first few hours then stopped and has not worked since. Dockrunner was not the cause as it has never been downloaded.

 

[hawkney911]

same as burtb.... never had dockrunner droid stopped home screen rotation after the first few days.

this is how the phone is designed you do not want to screen trying to rotate every time you shift positions or move it.

 

[droppedd]

I did not claim any % values on how many people are experiencing the problem. You are making them up.

for most Droid phones auto rotate worked... and it stopped working once DockRunner was installed

most = more than half. Which means at least 50%. If you didn't mean that, you should at least use a weasel word like "some" or even "many" to make the generalized implication you're trying to make.

On this very thread itself there others reporting the same problem

Who? Are we reading the same thread?

I still maintain that any problems with auto-rotation is not caused by DockRunner, period. Some people noticed the issue at some point after installing DockRunner; that only .01% of users contacted support about it should indicate that even the noticed correlation is pretty low (by comparison, I get easily 10-20x as many support emails fro users who can't figure out how to exit dock mode, or requesting features).

I also think a quick bit of googling should tell you that even whatever level of correlation people are noticing is no higher than the correlation with any other random Android app. If you think DockRunner requires that disclaimer, then you have to hold that *every* app on the Market requires it. See https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/19000?start=30&tstart=0 -- people noticed the loss of autorotate after running a number of apps, including Astro FileManager and others. The fact is that Motorola themselves say it's an intended system behavior, most Droids never auto-rotated at all (go to a Verizon store - try some demo units), and that any that did seem to lose that behavior from some random system trigger that has nothing to do with specific applications installed on the phone.

Your claim is starting to remind me of the Birthers' Obama birth certificate debate. There's really no level of evidence that would satisfy what you seem to want; "you can't prove that X *doesn't* cause Y" isn't reason for disclaimers... or everything would need a disclaimer for *everything*. ("This head of lettuce has not been proven conclusively *not* to cause spontaneous combustion, body lice, or X-ray vision.")

 

[roxito]

On this very thread itself there others reporting the same problem

Who? Are we reading the same thread?

Read Sam's post.

If you think DockRunner requires that disclaimer, then you have to hold that *every* app on the Market requires it. See https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/19000?start=30&tstart=0 -- people noticed the loss of autorotate after running a number of apps, including Astro FileManager and others.

No... Not *every* App requires such disclaimer.. just the ones that are known to have triggered the problem. Its only a few of them... no need to exaggerate.

Pointing at 10 other guys who managed to get away with stealing cars doesnt legitimize the act. Consumers have the right to know.

I've wasted too much time because of your silly app... I am done with this thread.

 

[Flomaster]

EDIT:I had to power off the phone to fix my problem. DockRunner has been uninstalled

SOB.... I installed dockrunner.... now I can't close it, and my phone is stuck in landscape mode HELP...
I have tried going to settings>applications> running and I do not see it running, yet I know for a fact it is because its being displayed up in my notification bar up top

-=Jason=-

 

[droppedd]

SOB.... I installed dockrunner.... now I can't close it, and my phone is stuck in landscape mode HELP...
I have tried going to settings>applications> running and I do not see it running, yet I know for a fact it is because its being displayed up in my notification bar up top

It's not running in the background, ever. It runs, changes the system setting and creates a notification, and exits. You have to run the app a second time to exit dock mode. It does not stay in memory after it does its thing. That's the whole point of the notification - one-click access to rerun the app to exit dock mode. It's a toggle. It's pretty clearly stated in the app description, the popup that shows when you run it, and in the explanation in the app's notification.

Sorry you had trouble with that -- I'm open to suggestions for ways to make that clearer to users, but I really can't think of any ways to make it more obvious without being irritating.

 

[Flomaster]

I would click the home button and it would show me my home screen, I could click my app drawer and pull up other apps, and all the while the little docker icon was being displayed in my notification at the top. I tried to drop it down and clicked and it would just put my phone back into dock mode... and this whole time my screen was LOCKED in landscape I am not making stuff up and I actually liked the dock until I wanted to exit out and use the phone again.

when in dock mode pressing the menu button and having an EXIT or close would be ideal.


-=Jason=-

 

[rjsurfer]

I have had my Droid for a few weeks now and for the first day or so the home page auto-rotated without opening the keyboard. Somewhere along the way I lost that ability, never ran Dockrunner or any other program that would effect that.

Almost sounds like a programming change came from Verizon that made the difference.

Ron W.

 

[tfarrellsr]

droppedd,
You should clearly state that installing your DockRunner app could permanently disable the auto rotate functionality on the Droid. Even if Google/Motorola never officially intended this auto rotate to work.. it worked on my phone and i liked it that way. It may not be a fault in your code, that the auto rotate stops working... but that does not absolve you from clearly stating it to users. You are responsible for the many Droids that don't autorotate anymore!

I even tried hard resetting my Droid and the problem does not go away. I hate the day I tried the damn DockRunner.

When you click on the Dockrunner icon, the application will stop and the Droid home screen will go back into portrait mode.