iOS app shows splash screen; exits

Bug Reports
1

Observed behavior

Downloaded TestFlight to my iPhone16. Then downloaded Aspect. Opened Aspect. It showed a splash screen and then immediately exits. Relaunching gives the same behaviour.

Deleted the app and downloaded again (clicked link in “Getting Started on iOS”). Same behaviour.

Expected behavior

Not sure what I expected – I’m just trying it out. But definitely not just exiting!

Steps required to reproduce

See description above.

Operating system/Hardware used

iPhone16; iOS 18.5

2

The latest version should be able to start again, although the underlying cause isn’t clear, as there is unfortunately no visible diagnostics generated by the operating system, such as log output or a crash report. It was possible to track this down to a seemingly harmless change in how the app is built, though, and reverting that change fixed the issue.

3

Thanks. Got it downloaded.

During the library exchange process, I needed to kill the iPhone app and relaunch it before the desktop app found it. Even then, it was listed as “Mobile User@iPhone” rather than anything sensible related to me. It took some time to synch (I think) but then crashed after displaying the library storage devices. Relaunching, it displayed that screen again.

The message at the top of the screen says it’s synched “0 of 1,559”. The iPhone app shows a message periodically but it goes by too fast to read confidently.

I can’t figure out any way to interact with the iPhone app. All I see is the “Library Storage Devices” and “Automatic Imports” but I can’t interact with them.

Requesting a “syncronize now” on the desktop app doesn’t appear to do anything.

Quit the desktop app and the iPhone app crashed shortly thereafter.

Restarted everything. Poking around on the desktop, found this error message: “Errors during Synchronization Failed to fetch remote changes: Source library is missing requested HEAD revision: %s”

Should say that this is RC23 on the desktop but RC24 on the iPhone. Updated to RC24; no change.

4

The iOS version unfortunately still has some issues, most of them due to the way Apple has set up their development frameworks:

  • Listing all files in the Photos library is very slow, because testing whether a certain file is available locally on the phone requires an actual (relatively time consuming) attempt to read the whole file.
  • Importing files from the Photos library is very slow, mainly because it is not possible to read partial file contents (e.g. when just reading metadata).
  • Getting a proper user/device name requires a special permission that we still need to request from Apple, with no guarantee that it will be granted. The idea behind that is privacy/making it harder to create a device fingerprint, but unfortunately also prevents legitimate access.
  • We still need to implement detection of changed network connectivity on iOS.

So the latter two points will be fixed eventually, whereas it looks like the two former points are inevitable as long as Apple doesn’t provide additional access possibilities through their API. Somewhat ironically, accessing the Photos library via a cloud service is supported much better, but this is not an option for us.

It took some time to synch (I think) but then crashed after displaying the library storage devices. Relaunching, it displayed that screen again.

The crash appears to be caused by the same issue that also affects the current macOS version of the application, related to decoding videos over the network or, in this case, when reading them from the Photos library. There will be a new test flight release later today that fixes this.

I can’t figure out any way to interact with the iPhone app. All I see is the “Library Storage Devices” and “Automatic Imports” but I can’t interact with them.

The current app is meant to be a minimal starting point to enable getting pictures taken on the phone transferred to the desktop application. Apart from a few message dialogs, there is currently no way to interact through the UI. Once we have this working satisfactorily, we’ll make an official release and will then extend the functionality to also include a (read-only) gallery view of the library. The long term plan is then to successively include more functionality to bring it close to the full functionality of the desktop application.