ColorNote tried to kill my phone.

[Javier P]

Last night my phone started to break down. To make it short. Switching off by itself, power button unresponsive, settings stopped working, battery dropped to zero, heat, huge lag to do anything once I managed to power on (lag is not exactly the word). Not good at all. It was too late to do anything so I left it charging and went to sleep.

This morning I managed to get into recovery mode and tried to wipe the cache partition. After 8 minutes thinking "this is not good" the green robot managed to finish the wiping and the phone was OK for about 30 seconds before all the problems went back.

Took me a while to see the battery stats and ColorNote was with a 5%! I hadn't use it for a couple of days, so the culprit was clear. A couple of tries and I managed to force stop the sucker and everything was fine after that.

My guess is that it was in a sync loop out of nowhere, but the whole thing is pretty weird. I've been using ColorNote since I bought this phone and the last update was in April.

So, my question. Has anyone seen this problem before?

In the battery graph you can see a bit of the whole mess.

 

[B. Diddy]

Remind us which phone you have? It'd be interesting to see if the problem persists as you continue to use ColorNote. I wonder if you can definitely pinpoint ColorNote as the problem, or if that is a relatively normal battery usage percentage by the app.

Do you know if those figures represent the battery usage since the battery died and you charged it up, or does it span that entire period shown in the graph? If it's only a short period after you started recharging, it's possible ColorNote was just using 5% of the battery to do some initial syncing.

 

[Javier P]

My phone is a Moto G 2013.

Diddy, I wouldn't blame an app if I wasn't sure which the culprit was. It was an struggle to solve my problem and everything was normal right after I force stopped ColorNote. Sounds weird, I know.

I've been happily using that app since February with no problem at all and I'm sure that it was a cascade of coincidences that no one can predict (when young I made my money programming and I know these things just happen).

After everything was OK I just uninstalled the app and will try to get in touch with the devs. I'm not trying to give bad press to their app, just curious what happened.

About the 5%. It's the 5% of the whole graph (almost 19 hours) , and I think it represents the 70% (or even more) of the last hours, when the problems started.

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, cool. I know from your previous posts that you're a sharp and knowledgeable user, but I just wanted to make sure I understood that graph completely.

I've had experiences in the past with various apps that seem to be associated with precipitous battery drain on my Nexus 7, although never as steep as what you're showing there. For me, they always seemed to be due to certain live wallpapers.

 

[knight_esk]

this happened to me too today, I ate even did a factory reset.
When I installed ColorNote, the problem started again, and just when I removed it, the problem stopped, my phone is a Moto X, sorry for the bad english ( by google translate.. )

 

[Javier P]

Did you managed to see the battery stats?

 

[Golfdriver97]

this happened to me too today, I ate even did a factory reset.
When I installed ColorNote, the problem started again, and just when I removed it, the problem stopped, my phone is a Moto X, sorry for the bad english ( by google translate.. )

Welcome to the forums.

Did you managed to see the battery stats?

At least you were able to diagnose the problem yourself, and give the community a heads up about the app and the Moto G.

Edit: Without seeing the graph, I would guess color note was causing a wakelock. You have several solid blue bars on the bottom of the graph, in your first picture.

 

[Javier P]

I think that the blue bar in the general graph is just WiFi on. I forgot to take an screenshot of the other graph so I didn't see the awake bar. But sure, there was a crazy wakelock.

I asked knight about his battery stats to see if ColorNote was as well using a big chunk of battery and to compare with mine.

I sent a couple of emails to the devs and could be good to have more information about this glitch.

 

[Golfdriver97]

I think that the blue bar in the general graph is just WiFi on. I forgot to take an screenshot of the other graph so I didn't see the awake bar. But sure, there was a crazy wakelock.

I asked knight about his battery stats to see if ColorNote was as well using a big chunk of battery and to compare with mine.

I sent a couple of emails to the devs and could be good to have more information about this glitch.

Wifi makes sense too...first cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet...lol

 

[Javier P]

Wifi makes sense too...first cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet...lol

 

[Javier P]

this happened to me too today, I ate even did a factory reset.
When I installed ColorNote, the problem started again, and just when I removed it, the problem stopped, my phone is a Moto X, sorry for the bad english ( by google translate.. )

Você mora no Brasil?

Hey Knight! Where do you live? Brazil? I just found in a Brazilian forum that Motorola recommended to uninstall ColorNote if your phone started to behave as I described before. Both G and X.

Not sure if the problem is just here in Brazil. I can't find anything in English.

http://www.motoxbrasil.com.br/topic/1091-moto-x-dando-bug/page-3

 

[Javier P]

Or here. Nothing in English.

http://www.reclameaqui.com.br/10442...to-g-nao-liga-mais-e-agora-estou-sem-celular/

 

[Javier P]

More info.

Last midnight in Brazil changed the time to summertime (+1 hour). The problem is someway related to this. 24 hours before the change some phones started to crash. That was my case. I noticed the problems only after midnight. Most people had ColorNote installed and removing it solved the problem. Some others had to set manually the time zone in the settings.

Looks limited to Motorola phones in Brazil and they are "still on it".

 

[Golfdriver97]

Interesting.....don't know why, but it is interesting.

 

[Javier P]

Interesting.....don't know why, but it is interesting.

And the plot thickens

Some people in Androidpit Brazil and forums are reporting the same issue with LG G2 and Nexus 5.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Now since it is spreading to other device, I am curious as to what changed in the coding of the app that is causing this?

 

[B. Diddy]

It's gotta be something about the time shift.

 

[Javier P]

Yes, definitely related, and Motorola posted how to fixed that. Their page is still with the notice to uninstall ColorNote though.

In the morning after the time shift I noticed that my clock wasn't on time (I live in a part of Brazil where they didn't change it and my phone did). Went to the settings and select network time zone automatic. No problems doing that and the clock is with the right time.

And no notice from the ColorNote team, and that's weird when you are being blamed from Motorola.

 

[B. Diddy]

It always puzzles me when only certain parts of a country go along with time shifts. In the US, it's called Daylight Savings Time, but certain parts of the country don't do the shift, for various reasons.

It sounds like the issue surfaced only recently, so maybe it's too early for the ColorNote team to formulate a response. Anyway, good detective work, Javier!

 

[Javier P]

The closest to the equator the less sense it does the daylight saving. Here the sunset in summer is less that half an hour later than in winter!

Plenty of time, I'm just overseeing some builders in the house, so let's play detective a bit more.*

Motorola recognised some problems. It means the time records for tomorrow are inconsistent or just corrupted. At midnight ColorNote decides is time to sync, it finishes the job and goes to the phone records for tomorrow and can't filter out the wrong data. It checks its 24h. daily schedule and sees that the next midnight is 25 hours away! That's a long time for the process so starts syncing again. And after a couple of loops my phone starts to go crazy.

Some users said that the problem stopped by itself the next day, after the shift, when midnight comes after 24 hours again.

I know, I know. More than a wild guess (BS I'd say), but if was fun anyway.