Electric Prayer

The Kindle Fire has a bug which makes all pages in the Universalis and Catholic Calendar apps blank. (We have had just two reports of non-Kindle Fire devices being affected, but it is almost always the Kindle Fire).

The apps themselves continue to work normally in every other respect: for instance, the calendar listing is still visible, and you can switch from one page to another.  It is just that the content of the pages themselves is blank.

The bug appears intermittently, on specific dates, the same date each year. It appeared in August 2013, and again in August 2014. Both times it went away after a few days. 11 August appears to be the peak day for bug reports.

We have conducted detailed research, thanks to one of the Fathers of the London Oratory who was experiencing the bug and able to lend us his Kindle Fire.

1. Only early models are affected. Modern Kindle Fires aren’t.
2. The bug is not in Universalis but in Android itself.
3. The bug is triggered by viewing Morning Prayer for 11 August, the feast of St Clare.
4. Once the bug has been triggered, the text of the page is never updated again.

How to get round it

1. Move to an Hour other than Morning Prayer, or a date other than 11 August. You won’t see any change in the text yet, but the headings at the top of the screen will show the date and the hour.
2. Close Universalis and shut down your device completely.
3. Power up your device, and the problem will have gone away.

What we have done

In the latest releases of the Universalis and Catholic Calendar apps, released in September 2016, we have changed the way in which text is displayed. The main motive for doing this was to get more control of scrolling, and to lay the foundations for future plans (such as a page-turning mode as an alternative to the scrolling one). But the new display mode also avoids the defective component in Android, and the St Clare bug no longer occurs.

The new way of displaying text is turned on automatically, and you don’t have to do anything: just make sure you have the latest update of Universalis or Catholic Calendar.

The Kindle Fire has a bug which makes all pages in the Universalis and Catholic Calendar apps blank. (We have had just two reports of non-Kindle Fire devices being affected, but it is almost always the Kindle Fire).

The apps themselves continue to work normally in every other respect: for instance, the calendar listing is still visible, and you can switch from one page to another.  It is just that the content of the pages themselves is blank.

The bug appears intermittently. It appeared in August 2013, and again in August 2014. Both times it went away after a few days. 11 August appears to be the peak day for bug reports.

The bug has appeared again in August 2015. Following previous experience, it should go away by itself in a few days.

Almost all Android devices are unaffected by this bug, and it seems likely that most Kindle Fires are also unaffected. We have no device at all with this problem.

There is nothing we can do until we do have an affected device at a time when it is affected. We have been offered the loan of such a device so if the bug persists for another day or so, we may be able to make progress.

What you can do

Nothing really, except wait. If the bug is triggered at the time the Universalis app starts, then you might occasionally try one of the following:

1. Shut down the Universalis app and then restart it.
2. Shut down the device completely and then power it up again.

Last year, one user reported that turning wi-fi off and on again cured the problem. This is obviously impossible – but it shows that there is something strange going on deep inside Android.

How you can help us

If you do get the problem, please try the following and let us know the result:

1. Ask Universalis to display a page for 29 June 2015. Does text appear, or is the page blank?
2. Leaving that page displayed, shut down your device completely and then power it up again and open Universalis. It will still be on 29 June 2015. Does text appear, or is the page blank?