react-native-background-actions: Occasional Background task crash in production

The issue only appears sporadically in devices in the wild, so I’m afraid I can’t really do much to test it and get any decent results. If somebody else encounters this issue and knows why, let us know!

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 2.6.1 🎉

The release is available on:

• GitHub release
• npm package (@latest dist-tag)

Your semantic-release bot 📦🚀

@Rapsssito I’ll working on it on later day. Maybe I could provide a reproduceble code

@stewartmcgown, thanks for the reproducible code! It looks like an error when trying to access the React context while it is initialized. I will try to fix it ASAP.

For a bit of extra context, I’ve been able to trigger this via two different situations - both to do with restarting the app.

a) CodePush.restartApp() will occasionally trigger this

b) Restarting via the AlarmManager will cause this error every time unless a delay is added to the BackgroundService.start(…) call. I discovered this when implementing a periodic hard restart for our Kiosk app to prevent memory leaks over several months of operation.

e.g. code like this will trigger the background actions crash when the app is reinitialised.

 private void _restart() {
    Intent mStartActivity = new Intent(getCurrentActivity(), SplashActivity.class);
    int mPendingIntentId = 123456;
    PendingIntent mPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(mContext, mPendingIntentId,    mStartActivity, PendingIntent.FLAG_CANCEL_CURRENT);
    AlarmManager mgr = (AlarmManager)mContext.getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);
    mgr.set(AlarmManager.RTC, System.currentTimeMillis() + 1000, mPendingIntent);
    System.exit(0);
  }

I’ve updated our call to background actions accordingly:

export const startHeartbeatTask = async () => {
  await BackgroundService.stop();

  /**
   * Why wait? When the app has been properly restarted via our
   * PhoenixModule, we need to make sure that the React context
   * has initialised properly before trying to re-attach the background
   * task to the activity.
   *
   * If we don't do that, we'll have serious problems and possibly
   * crashes on boot.
   *
   * This issue is slightly related.
   * https://github.com/Rapsssito/react-native-background-actions/issues/61
   *
   */
  setTimeout(() => BackgroundService.start(veryIntensiveTask, options), 10000);
  return () => BackgroundService.stop();
};

I’m seeing mostly the same bug:

java.lang.RuntimeException: 
  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleServiceArgs (ActivityThread.java:4796)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.access$3100 (ActivityThread.java:308)
  at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage (ActivityThread.java:2346)
  at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage (Handler.java:110)
  at android.os.Looper.loop (Looper.java:219)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.main (ActivityThread.java:8347)
  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke (Native Method)
  at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run (RuntimeInit.java:513)
  at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main (ZygoteInit.java:1055)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: 
  at android.app.PendingIntent.getActivity (PendingIntent.java:350)
  at android.app.PendingIntent.getActivity (PendingIntent.java:317)
  at com.asterinet.react.bgactions.RNBackgroundActionsTask.buildNotification (RNBackgroundActionsTask.java:40)
  at com.asterinet.react.bgactions.RNBackgroundActionsTask.onStartCommand (RNBackgroundActionsTask.java:80)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleServiceArgs (ActivityThread.java:4776)

currently only reported on an Huawei Mate 20 with Android 10 (SDK 29)

My code is a bit different though, as i start the background task when the app goes to background. It seems

getReactNativeHost().getReactInstanceManager().getCurrentReactContext()

returns null in that case. I now adapted the code a bit to see if that improves the behaviour, i’ll come back to report if that is true.