Alright, I figured it out. I guess this can be set as “handled”, though I think it could happen often enough with different users to warrant a few feature implementations, and small notes in-app.
After a few days of trying more things, I think I’ve nailed the issue on Android shutting down apps background processes when the phone is locked (say after 30 seconds of inactivity) or shortly after, even when the app battery usage is set to Unrestricted, and both Battery Saver and the developer options to kill background processes are off.
I noticed that this was causing both Symfonium and Poweramp to have their respective library sync interrupted.
The work around I found was setting my Screen timeout to 30 minutes and periodically keeping the screen on by clicking on it once and a while until the sync is completed.
This solved 100% of issues I mentionned in this post; after the sync was successfully completed in a single chunk, all playlists were present, persistent, and even the 10’000+ songs playlists loaded within a second.
I’ve been using Symfonium for 12h since and I have yet to encounter any bug, so I’m considering it as solved as far as I’m concerned.
[As a reference, my sync took around an hour and a half to complete.]
That said, Poweramp handled that upstream Android issue more gracefully though (by always displaying the sync progress in a precise way as to let the user know how the sync is progressing and whether or not it stalled or crashed, and by resuming the sync gracefully without any error), in such a way that I never paid much attention to it, and didn’t cause further complications.
Here are the potential improvements I could see for Symfonium to avoid this issue being encountered by new users:
- Displaying the progress in detail for playlist sync, with clear indications of if has stalled or crashed, rather than having “Syncing Playlists” being displayed for hours (and forever when the sync has crashed).
- Under the hood improvements to the sync process to gracefully resume sync if interrupted.
- Some way to prevent playlists from appearing and disappearing randomly after a crashed sync, or maybe displaying an overlay pop-up in the lines of “The sync has been interrupted. Playlists may be unstable. Recommended action: Sync library again and keep the device awake during the entire sync process.”
- An in-app checkable option to keep the phone awake during sync.
- Additional notes in the Sync menu mentionning that the phone must remain awake during sync, else it may cause some instabilities.
All this being said, now that I know how to avoid those issues, and that I had the opportunity to play more with this app, I am quite in awe with how you have taken “I will make a app to play songs” into an absolute masterpiece. And I’m not saying this lightly. You have literally solved every single compromise I’ve run into with every single other music app, and then took this one above and beyond what everyone else has been doing in a way that doesn’t even compare. To name just a few:
- Your responsiveness as a dev is impeccable.
- Your log uploading is a seamless experience.
- Your forum is modern, easy to navigate, and intuitive.
- The sheer amount of features you packed in is absolutely insane.
- And more than just that, all of them work without hiccups.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to another android music app.
This is the app I’ve been waiting for all this time.
Thank you.