Trouble at the bottom of the screen
The bugs that get past us aren't dramatic: a chat box hidden by the keyboard, stray gaps, uneven padding. Why small Android bugs slip through to users.
Trouble at the bottom of the screen
The bugs that get past us aren't the dramatic ones. They're small, they're mostly on Android, and most of them live along the bottom edge of the screen.
I'll be honest, it's frustrating. You can spend weeks on how a coach should talk to people and then watch a text box disappear behind the keyboard.
MIZE is our minimalism coach. Right now, the Android version in the Play Store has a bug in the Coach chat. You tap the box to type, the keyboard slides up, and the box doesn't move with it. It sits behind the keyboard while you type. The fix is built and waiting to be tested before it replaces the store version.
What the bottom edge has given us
Here's what turned up across the last few Android builds:
- The Coach chat input hiding under the keyboard, as above.
- An extra strip of empty space under the chat box and under the floating button, because the room for Android's navigation bar was being added twice.
- The Add Task button in the chat with uneven padding on its right side.
- On newer Android phones, the system's own launch screen showing the app icon over our intro animation. That one is still open.
None of these breaks the app. All of them make it look like nobody checked.
Why they slip through
They only show up in the exact conditions a real person creates. A real Android phone. Signed in, a few taps deep in the Coach chat, keyboard open. A fresh install with no account never gets there, and a quick look at a screen that's just sitting still won't show you a keyboard problem.
The keyboard bug had a specific cause. A newer version of Android changed how apps make room for the keyboard. Code that used to push the input up quietly stopped doing it, and nothing complained. The screen looked fine until someone tried to type.
That's what wears on me. Everything you thought to check passes, and the bug is waiting on the one screen where people actually talk to the Coach.
Why it matters more here
In MIZE, the chat isn't a side feature. It's where you go when you're stuck, and where the Coach suggests tasks to help you move forward. If the box you're typing into vanishes, the calm part of the product goes with it.
The same goes for the gaps and the padding. A minimalism app with stray empty space on screen isn't the kind of less we're going for.
What checking can't fix
Each of these now gets checked before a build goes out, so the ones we've fixed shouldn't come back quietly. That helps with repeats. It doesn't help with the next new one, which will probably be just as small and just as close to the bottom edge.
Some of it is simply the platform. Android runs on a huge range of phones, with different navigation bars and keyboards, and every one of them gets to interpret your layout a little differently. Nobody can hold all of them in their hand.
Keep the box on screen
People never see the hard parts of a build. They see the text box they're typing into. Lately a lot of the real work has been making sure it stays where they can see it.
More about MIZE.
