Live Tile Issues

[travis_valkyrie]

anybody here use foursquare? Umm yeah my live tile hasn't shown the leaderboards and its been 2 weeks now and it's still foursquare icon. I've addressed the issue to foursquare support and they claimed that it has been fixed months ago. Seriously, when launching the app it even says unable to connect to foursquare servers.

 

[femanuele]

Ok, some new findings:
I uninstalled every app in the background tasks list that I had disabled and rebooted my phone. Went back to check the list and...they were all still in the list. Uh oh, not a good sign. But a half hour later, it looks like my bg tasks are working again!

I'm not sure how often that background tasks list updates itself, but it's slightly troubling to me that the ones I uninstalled are still on the list. I guess the next step is to reinstall some of those apps and see what happens.

This definitely appears to be an OS problem, and it reminds me of the pre-Mango registry endpoints issue that affected push notifications. I'll keep posting updates if I discover anything new.

That's really a bad sign, when you uninstall apps they must disappear from the background tasks list. Maybe this changes from phone to phone. On my Lumia 800 they disappeared as soon as I uninstalled them, and the live tiles I was actually using have gone back to work almost immediately (without restarting the phone).
What's important is that you managed to make it work.
At the moment I'm helping Windows Phone support to understand the matter, doing some tests for them on my phone (which is understandable 'cause they probably wouldn't know how to repeat this issue on one of their phones). I'll post any updates I have, hoping they'll find something. I must mention that they've been incredibly supportive till now, I'd love to have this kind of customer care for any other service.

 

[femanuele]

anybody here use foursquare? Umm yeah my live tile hasn't shown the leaderboards and its been 2 weeks now and it's still foursquare icon. I've addressed the issue to foursquare support and they claimed that it has been fixed months ago. Seriously, when launching the app it even says unable to connect to foursquare servers.

That's odd, my Foursquare works just fine (and I doubt your problem is related to the generic live tile issue we're having...although you can easily find out if other third-party live tiles don't work properly).
I'd uninstall and reinstall Foursquare, if you haven't already tried that.
Also, a suggestion: Foursquare has now a great official app (it wasn't this good in the beginning), but the famous 4th & Mayor(which is a Foursquare client) is even better, maybe try that until you don't have a working Foursquare app.

 

[femanuele]

Now my Me tile has a notification in there, but Weather Flow still hasn't updated on the live tile.

The Me tile is not a third-party app (in fact it usually updates as soon as someone, for example, mentions you on Twitter, it doesn't take half an hour to update)...unfortunately it's not exacly always perfect, it bounces information on Microsoft servers (it doesn't directly check twitter, facebook, linked-in, etc.) so from time to time it doesn't update as fast as it should and, rarely, it skips some messages (probably 'cause there's too much downtime on servers and messages are considered old).
So, I wouldn't check the Me tile for the issue we're having, only third-party apps.

 

[femanuele]

It's worth mentioning that the issues that femanuele, I, and possibly others had were strictly related to background tasks, not push notifications. For example, I use WeatherLive. It uses push notifications to update the weather data and a background task to update the location. So for me, the weather would update just fine, but the location would not. I also have Pro Sports Scores and a Google Reader app pinned to start. Pro Sports Scores uses push notifications and updated just fine. The reader app uses background tasks and did not update.

I'm not sure what Weather flow uses to update the tile so this may or may not be the same issue.

Edit: after looking at Weather Flow in the Marketplace it looks like it does not use push notifications. So it must be using background tasks. Looks like it could be the same issue.

I have Weather Flow and can confirm it uses background tasks (in fact push notification would be really too much for something like weather updates).
What's brilliant about Weather Flow (relative to our problem here) is that its live tile reports not only the date of the last update but also the TIME. So you can know exactly at what time your tiles froze (like a broken clock

Also (not particularly relevant): I've found one piece of the OS that uses background tasks (I mean, w/o any trick) and thus suffers the same problems of third-party apps; I've always had "cnnbrk" (CNN twitter main account) pinned to my Start screen and it stopped working exactly like any other live tile. Consider that this isn't a tile that I've pinned thanks to some third-party app like the official Twitter client (in fact I don't use any Twitter app 'cause I've wrote mine ; for anyone who doesn't know this, you can pin any contact on your Start screen long-tapping on it in your contacts list (in the People's Hub), so that you can speed-call them or look at their social-network updates; of course, if you have added your twitter account (in Settings/accounts) you will have all your Twitter contacts in the People's Hub. So, I've added CNN twitter to my Start screen, and I knew it was using pure background tasks 'cause it didn't update at each CNN tweet but only showed their last tweet every thirty minutes.
So, this stops working too when you have the problem we're having.

F.

 

[femanuele]

Just noticed I have forgot to underline something maybe obvious but very important, when I posted the solution I've found: that one isn't a real solution because, naturally, you can't be forced to uninstall apps; it is acceptable to have a quota on "active" background tasks, not apps in general.
I was lucky 'cause I had a couple of apps I didn't really care of, but it's gonna soon arrive the moment that I install a new app and everything freezes again. Of course the app will have to use a background task, but the really good apps always do (and it doesn't matter if I want to use that feature, it's enough to install the app and run it to find a new task in your list).
That's why I'm helping Windows Phone support to understand this problem (though I don't have great hopes considering they can't test it themselves).

F.

 

[thed]

That's really a bad sign, when you uninstall apps they must disappear from the background tasks list. Maybe this changes from phone to phone. On my Lumia 800 they disappeared as soon as I uninstalled them, and the live tiles I was actually using have gone back to work almost immediately (without restarting the phone).

Eventually it updated and the deleted apps disappeared from the list. But it did take a long time. I'm not sure when it updated but it took several hours at least.

Just noticed I have forgot to underline something maybe obvious but very important, when I posted the solution I've found: that one isn't a real solution because, naturally, you can't be forced to uninstall apps; it is acceptable to have a quota on "active" background tasks, not apps in general.
I was lucky 'cause I had a couple of apps I didn't really care of, but it's gonna soon arrive the moment that I install a new app and everything freezes again. Of course the app will have to use a background task, but the really good apps always do (and it doesn't matter if I want to use that feature, it's enough to install the app and run it to find a new task in your list).
That's why I'm helping Windows Phone support to understand this problem (though I don't have great hopes considering they can't test it themselves).

F.

Now that I have things working, I'm slowly reinstalling some apps with background tasks that I had disabled in the hopes that I can at least figure out what the limit is. But it could take a while. Testing this is a painfully slow process.

Good to know that someone at MS is listening. Be sure to let us know if they discover anything!

 

[SouthpawJosh]

With my phone it just must have been a delay with the Me tile. My Weather Flow app still hasn't updated in over 24 hours.

 

[SouthpawJosh]

Just to update again: my Weather Flow app did not update on the Live Tile from Friday morning until Sunday early afternoon. It updated twice, and has since stopped again. It hasn't updated in 18 hours now.

 

[femanuele]

Just to update again: my Weather Flow app did not update on the Live Tile from Friday morning until Sunday early afternoon. It updated twice, and has since stopped again. It hasn't updated in 18 hours now.

SouthpawJosh: I can't be sure that my solution will work on every phone, but if I were you I'd try some other live tile; WeatherFlow can be stuck with a completely different problem (not necessarily their bug, maybe some other rare fault of the OS). If you already have other third-party live tiles that work then your problem is definitely with WeatherFlow and I would insist with the developer to find a solution.
What I can tell you about WeatherFlow is that they did something around the usual mechanism of the background task; I know this 'cause my WeatherFlow live tile updates exactly every hour and, as a developer, I'm sure that the OS doesn't offer such an option (if you use background tasks in your app you will be called every half hour); so, it's clear they've done something clever to limit the amount of data used by their app (in fact frequent updates on weather forecast are useless), that is: they do something in their background task only half the times they're called, thus they check for something before executing the update...and maybe there's a problem there. To do this they have to save their state and maybe they don't save anything when your storage has less than 10% free space (I don't know, I'm just imagining a scenario).
Anyways, my point is: one live tile that's not working is probably a different problem than the one we're having here. Also: my live tiles (WeatherFlow included) stopped completely (for a week) until I found that solution, it didn't happen that they worked for a brief moment and then went dark again.

F.

 

[SouthpawJosh]

SouthpawJosh: I can't be sure that my solution will work on every phone, but if I were you I'd try some other live tile; WeatherFlow can be stuck with a completely different problem (not necessarily their bug, maybe some other rare fault of the OS). If you already have other third-party live tiles that work then your problem is definitely with WeatherFlow and I would insist with the developer to find a solution.
What I can tell you about WeatherFlow is that they did something around the usual mechanism of the background task; I know this 'cause my WeatherFlow live tile updates exactly every hour and, as a developer, I'm sure that the OS doesn't offer such an option (if you use background tasks in your app you will be called every half hour); so, it's clear they've done something clever to limit the amount of data used by their app (in fact frequent updates on weather forecast are useless), that is: they do something in their background task only half the times they're called, thus they check for something before executing the update...and maybe there's a problem there. To do this they have to save their state and maybe they don't save anything when your storage has less than 10% free space (I don't know, I'm just imagining a scenario).
Anyways, my point is: one live tile that's not working is probably a different problem than the one we're having here. Also: my live tiles (WeatherFlow included) stopped completely (for a week) until I found that solution, it didn't happen that they worked for a brief moment and then went dark again.

F.

Good points. What caused me to notice this issue in the first place, is that WeatherFlow was not my first weather app where the live tile stopped working. First it was AccuWeather, then it was Weather Channel. I decided to buy WeatherFlow and now it seems to suffer the same issue. I think I'm going to re-try the other weather apps I mentioned and see if it's still an issue moving forward.

 

[jimski]

Interesting theories. I have 23 apps that "can" run background tasks. And 8 apps that are set to run background tasks, including Weather Channel. All of my tiles update regularly on my L900 since pre-launch day. And they all worked fine on my Surround. I also have two push apps, SportsScores and ProSportsScores, which all also update regularly.

Apps can run a background task at any (fixed) interval they deem necessary, just not more often than every 30 minutes. Urban Dictionary for example, only updates its tile once per day. And CleverToDo does not check your device database every 30 minutes for new "daily" tasks.

As my 8 tasks are close to the L900s limit of 9 active background tasks, occasionally one will become disabled if I run a media app that temporarily uses a task or I install a new app that activates a background task by default. But otherwise, they all just work.

Urban Dictionary did stop updating for nearly a week, but I noticed it started working again last night, with no interaction on my part. They have had these problems in the past so I wasn't concerned about something going wrong on my device.


Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express Pro

 

[femanuele]

Interesting theories. I have 23 apps that "can" run background tasks. And 8 apps that are set to run background tasks, including Weather Channel. All of my tiles update regularly on my L900 since pre-launch day. And they all worked fine on my Surround. I also have two push apps, SportsScores and ProSportsScores, which all also update regularly.

Apps can run a background task at any (fixed) interval they deem necessary, just not more often than every 30 minutes. Urban Dictionary for example, only updates its tile once per day. And CleverToDo does not check your device database every 30 minutes for new "daily" tasks.

As my 8 tasks are close to the L900s limit of 9 active background tasks, occasionally one will become disabled if I run a media app that temporarily uses a task or I install a new app that activates a background task by default. But otherwise, they all just work.

Urban Dictionary did stop updating for nearly a week, but I noticed it started working again last night, with no interaction on my part. They have had these problems in the past so I wasn't concerned about something going wrong on my device.


Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express Pro

jimski: apparently this problem is very uncommon, we still don't know what triggers it (but we're sure it's not the background agents limit).

 

[thed]

Quick update. I've been reinstalling all the apps with background tasks one by one over the weekend, waiting each time to see if everything was still working. I'm now up to 20 total with 4 enabled (one of those is the homebrew Battery Status app with 15 minute interval). Background tasks still appear to be working. I'm gonna keep going to see if they break at any point.

 

[femanuele]

Quick update. I've been reinstalling all the apps with background tasks one by one over the weekend, waiting each time to see if everything was still working. I'm now up to 20 total with 4 enabled (one of those is the homebrew Battery Status app with 15 minute interval). Background tasks still appear to be working. I'm gonna keep going to see if they break at any point.

Good to know, Thed. Did you just remove them all? I mean, without resetting your phone to factory settings? 'Cause if this is true then we can hope that when background tasks reach zero count maybe the OS executes a "clean all" of the stuff that broke it in the first place.

F.

 

[thed]

Good to know, Thed. Did you just remove them all? I mean, without resetting your phone to factory settings? 'Cause if this is true then we can hope that when background tasks reach zero count maybe the OS executes a "clean all" of the stuff that broke it in the first place.

F.

I didn't actually uninstall them all. I uninstalled everything but the 4 apps I had with active background tasks. At that point I noticed they were working again so I didn't bother to uninstall those 4. So I'm afraid that what you said isn't the case. Nice idea though.

 

[jfa1]

Good points. What caused me to notice this issue in the first place, is that WeatherFlow was not my first weather app where the live tile stopped working. First it was AccuWeather, then it was Weather Channel. I decided to buy WeatherFlow and now it seems to suffer the same issue. I think I'm going to re-try the other weather apps I mentioned and see if it's still an issue moving forward.

I am using weatherview its from Sweden and free and seems to work well for me on my focus 1.3 and now the Lumia 900

 

[SouthpawJosh]

I am using weatherview its from Sweden and free and seems to work well for me on my focus 1.3 and now the Lumia 900

Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.

 

[SouthpawJosh]

Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.

Ok I downloaded this app and its live tile doesn't work either. I can't imagine all of my now four weather apps have unrelated issues with the live tile updating.

 

[thed]

One more update. I managed to break all my background tasks again, but I have things figured out now. For me, it looks like the "magic number" of total background task apps is 22. If my list gets up to 22 apps, all the background tasks stop working. I uninstall one to get down to 21 and they all work again.

I still have no idea why but at least I sort of have things figured out, at least for my phone.