Recently, most probably after a recent security update for Redmi Note 7 devices, I became unable to create a widget while using GoLaucher Z. Whenever I try, the launcher gives a default message reading “Unable to access the application, try to restart GoLauncher”.
To date, I have found no combination of recent versions of GoLauncher and Flowx which work together. The fact that a couple of other widgets exhibited this behaviour points to a general issue, but one which I am unable to pinpoint and solve on my own.
If you have time to check into this, I would appreciate it.
Yes, the default launcher worked perfectly. This seems to be an issue with how GoLauncher accesses each app in order to get the widget going. A few apps started exhibiting this issue simultaneously, but most were unaffected.
Yes, I contacted them early on, but the lack of reply for more than a month is quite in line with their modus operandi
Moreover, if this issue appeared on all app widgets, this would indicate a specific issue with the combination of launcher + device + security update. That it affect some specific user-created apps points to changes that affect the communication between launcher and apps and which some developers had the chance to account for beforehand.
Widget are the most painful things to code on Android. Mainly because Android has changed the way background operations work in order to reduce abuse and save battery.
But this is not likely the reason why the Flowx widgets are not working on Go Launcher. Android has standard and Flowx has to follow them in order for the widgets to show default Android so Flowx is following those standard. I suspect there is a little bug on the GoLauncher side.
For interests sake, there is nearly no communication between the app and the launcher. Essentially, Flowx defines what the widget looks like in XML, then tells the system “I want to update my widget”. Then the system reads the XML and draws it. Part of the XML is telling the system what to launch when a user clicks on the widget. It’s like there is a wall between the app and the widget where there is a hole you pass paper messages through. Rightly so, it is all for security reasons but it makes widgets limited in features and hard to developer.
Once Flowx widgets we not rendering properly on a launcher and user reported the issue. I spent a bit of time tracking the issue down, installing the launcher, testing things only to find the launcher was measuring the widget size differently from standard Android. I couldn’t do anything to fix it.
I see… Thank you for your time, first of all! Is there anything I could try to re-report to the developers of the launcher in case it helps get them bump fixing this upwards in their list of priorities?
