Testing Android build, user experiencing crashing issues that I am not encountering - any ideas?

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1

Godot Version

Godot 4.3 Stable (Steam Version)

Question

Hi, I’m working on a pretty simple 2D Visual Novel / point and click game, and we’re currently looking at making a version available for Android, initially just as a directly distributed APK but with a view to get on the Play Store down the line. I personally have a Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 6 that I’ve been using for testing, and I roped in a friend who has a Pixel 6a for good measure too.

When I export with the compatibility renderer (which as far as I know, on Android uses OpenGL ES 3.0) all 3 of these phones are capable of running the game with zero issues. Now I’ve been trying to get the game to our first actual outside Android tester, who has both a Samsung Galaxy A16 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite. Not high end devices, but certainly should be able to handle a 2D OpenGL-reliant Godot game based on both the minimum specs provided by the docs, and also anecdotal evidence I’ve seen testing the Windows build on even worse hardware, but for whatever reason, this user cannot run the game on either device. They experience the game opening, showing the “editor background” colour, and then crashing and kicking them out. I have not been able to replicate this on any device available to me, and just to be sure it wasn’t some strange OpenGL interaction, I supplied a Vulkan version which did the exact same.

The game does output logs, but I can’t get this user to root their device and I’m fairly confident that, without doing so, there’s no way to access logs because they’re sandboxed.

So, I’m stumped - does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing this, from experience? We’ve verified that this user’s device absolutely meets the requirements to run an exported Godot game, and it’s not as if it’s a particularly demanding game in the first place (this user has played more complex 3D games on their device, so unlikely to be a spec issue). The only thing I’ve perhaps thought is that it could be a RAM issue, since it seems to occur during initialisation and may just be that the device is failing to load everything into RAM and then crashing, but other than that I really don’t have any idea where to look or how to even gain more insight. Any ideas are appreciated, and I’m happy to supply any additional info as needed - thank you!

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Android software version matters and recently all Android is shifting to the new 16kb page size at the end of this year. Annd 4.3 uses the old size. You may need to upgrade to 4.5.

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Hmm, was unaware of this so thanks for bringing it to my attention - but, if this was the case, wouldn’t I have run into the issue myself? The two devices I’m personally testing on are Android 15 and Android 16 respectively and both of them have zero issues opening the game. The testers devices are Android 16 and Android 12, and both experience the exact same behaviour when trying to launch the game - surely even if the page size issue was the cause, 1) I’d see it on my devices also, and 2) that Android 12 device should be able to launch the game without worrying about this, since it’s not something that’s relevant on versions below Android 15?

Again though, thanks for bringing this to my attention - it may become a separate headache even if it’s not the current one, though it very well may be if you think this behaviour may be different on different devices.