HTC Sense has stopped unexpectedly

[VidJunky]

I'm guessing that since this has been happening to me for a few days now and I'm the first to post this it's only me. It's kind of annoying but isn't really causing me too many problems. It happens with apps open and after apps close. I have to acknowledge a notification, and if I'm not in an app I have to wait for a moment or two for my home screen to come back. I haven't noticed anything else, but it happens 2 or 3 times out of every 5 times I use the device. No particular app, it can happen when playing a game, browsing, or checking texts or email. I can only speculate that it is a resource thing. I have noticed that I have to go in and mount my SD after every reboot. Not sure if the two are related.

 

[acejavelin]

I'm guessing that since this has been happening to me for a few days now and I'm the first to post this it's only me. It's kind of annoying but isn't really causing me too many problems. It happens with apps open and after apps close. I have to acknowledge a notification, and if I'm not in an app I have to wait for a moment or two for my home screen to come back. I haven't noticed anything else, but it happens 2 or 3 times out of every 5 times I use the device. No particular app, it can happen when playing a game, browsing, or checking texts or email. I can only speculate that it is a resource thing. I have noticed that I have to go in and mount my SD after every reboot. Not sure if the two are related.

You could try booting into recovery and clearing cache or uninstalling anything that updated or you installed recently and try it, but I am suspecting you will need to factory default.

 

[gerrya]

I have been getting this on my Rezound and my wife's Rezound as well for a few days now. I thought it may have been the Google Talk/ Hangout update, since that is the only thing I can think of that we both have in common that changed, but I uninstalled the update and we are still getting it. Not sure about the SD card being related cause that has been happening to me for months. I may change to a new Scene and add apps and widgets slowly to see if its a widget causing the problem.

 

[gerrya]

Took me a while, but it looks like it was the Battery Watcher widget that was causing it. I made a new home screen and added every app back but no widgets. then I kept adding my widgets back until that one gave me the Sense has stopped. Weird cause I've had that app for years with no problems.

 

[VidJunky]

Yeah, I'm not so sure. Not just because I don't have that app but also because as you said you've had that one for some time now. So this will be the proof, disable, uninstall, or whatever you feel takes it out of the equation and run for a day or two. If it doesn't come back I'll say that was your cause, then I'll have to find mine. I run circular battery, it puts a display in your notification bar. I guess it could be a battery thing, but I didn't think the last update concerned the battery or charging.

 

[RFclipse]

I have been getting this on my Rezound and my wife's Rezound as well for a few days now. I thought it may have been the Google Talk/ Hangout update, since that is the only thing I can think of that we both have in common that changed, but I uninstalled the update and we are still getting it.

I'm in the same exact boat - the issue has started occuring on both my wife's Rezound and mine as well. I first started noticing the issue on 5/21. Our son was born on 5/22, so this was a huge headache as I was trying to respond to text messages and emails to coordinate visits, etc. I also thought that it may have coincided with the update to Hangouts since this was the last thing that I remember being updated. This was happening so frequently on my phone that I decided to bite the bullet and do a factory reset on my device. I didn't touch the SD card, but performed the full factory reset on everything else. Well, the issue is still not resolved. I use My Backup Pro to back up Apps and Data during a factory reset. For those of you who've used this app, you know that apps are restored using the original APK, and then all of the apps are later updated to the latest level through the Play store. I ran the App restore prior to restoring any data or phone settings. Right in the middle of restoring the Key Ring app, I got the first message that Sense had crashed. This was literally 5 minutes after performing the reset and all I'd done was started restoring apps with their original APKs. I've had the Key Ring app on my phone for > 1 year, so I'm sure that it's not that app which is causing the problem. The issue does not seem to be tied to any particular app. It's been occurring somewhat randomly when I have any app open.

If anyone discovers a cure, please let us know...

 

[VidJunky]

Well even though it's just the three of us so far, it's starting to sound like hangouts may be the cause. If it is why just us three and what can we do about it?

Posted via Android Central App

 

[gerrya]

I'm actually still getting it also. I changed to a new scene and only put my apps back, but left the widgets off and it's only happened once in 2 days.

 

[LarryBauer]

It has been happening to my Rezound too, but not my wifes. It started the 5/21/13. There were other apps that updated on my phone that day, along with the Talk replacement; Hangouts. I wish Google would give us a simple list of what updated and when on the website. It seem to present the message after running some apps, but I have not been able to ID which one. I've been also using the ol' Advanced Task Manager (ATM) to try to see what the heck it running. I don't have it automatically kill anything, but it is sometimes good as a monitor. By the time the crash happens though, it is probably not listed in the ATM anymore anyway. OS Monitor is nice for logs but I have not figured out what may be messing up. I found a service (?) that had a memory heap problem just before HTC Sense had problems.

These are not all together in the log, but are not far from each other:
ERROR dalvikvm-heap Out of memory on a 17572880-byte allocation.
ERROR dalvikvm Out of memory: Heap Size=49059KB
WARNING dalvikvm threadid=10: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x40ac4228)
ERROR EmbeddedLogger App crashed! Process: com.htc.launcher (I believe this is HTC Sense crashing)

What the heck is dalvikvm ?

I hope this helps.
-LarryB

 

[acejavelin]

"dalvikvm" is a java based virtual machine that is the bases for running your programs (the ones that have the .apk extension). In order to make access times faster (because there's not JIT (just in time) compiler installed by default), the dalvik-cache is the result of dalvik doing a optimization of the running program. Sounds confusing. It's similar to the prefetch files in Windows.

Try wiping the dalvik cache... in a stock, non-rooted phone, reboot into Recovery (Hold VOL DN+POWER at power on) and select Recovery, then wait until the triangle goes red, press VOL UP+POWER simultaneously and a new menu should show up, you can wipe/format the cache partition from there. You should not lose anything, but on the first few executions of apps they may be sluggish until the cache is rebuilt.

If you are rooted, Amon Ra, TWRP, and CWM Recovery all have options to format/wipe the cache partition and Dalvik cache.

 

[RFclipse]

Well, I got bored on Monday and rooted my device to see if this would help. I'm not running a custom ROM, but I did clear all cache and perform a factory reset as part of the process. First thing I did was removed all the bloatware (pre-installed apps that can't be removed unless rooted). Bad news is that the issue remains. I'll continue to monitor things and let the group know if I can isolate the app that's causing the problem.

 

[gerrya]

Mine seems completely random. Doesn't matter what app I'm in. Not much changed that the wife and I share except Hangouts and I reverted back to Talk and continued to get it. We also both use Swift Key for keyboard. I cleared the Dalvik last night and it seemed better for a while then it started again. I notice sometimes I dont get "HTC sense has failed" and it just says "Loading" as it builds the home screens.

 

[LarryBauer]

I wonder if it is widget related? I'm thinking about simply removing all my widgets for awhile and seeing if that stops it. I can make it fail fairly consistently crash by adding and removing a widget of an app that I only recently download. Adding a widget probably does a bunch of calls on HTC Sense. So I'll remove all the widgets, then, one by one, put them back on the screens to see which one causes the problem. If only one widget is causing this, I would expect things to be fine until I added that one. It might crash when I added it, and also continue to crash. The experiment might have no effect or any widget on the screen might do it.

 

[acejavelin]

I really don't understand this... I use Google Hangouts, which everyone seems to think is the cause of this issue, on the stock ROM and I have never once had this issue. Not that that piece of information helps at all, but if Google Hangouts is the cause it is because of a combination of things, not Hangout itself.

 

[LarryBauer]

I don't think everyone thinks it is the Talk > Hangout update. I know I don't think it is. One person on this thread reverted back to Talk (removed updates) and still had the problem.

 

[VidJunky]

ace, I would say the biggest reason so many are ready to throw this problem at Hangouts is because the issue seemed to start around the time of the update/change. Granted not a lot of people are having this issue, and I give you all day that it may be coincidence, but the two events seem to coincide pretty closely. Meanwhile, we've all seen issues in the past with updates that cause some users headaches and not others. Take VLS for example. I saw hundreds of posts about how horrible that addition was. "It killed my battery...", "It's over taxing my memory...", "It's... whatever...", but you would always see those posts from people who were like "what the heck? I'm not seeing any change". It may be a hardware compatibility issue. Even though all of our phones are similar the parts that make them up are not always exactly the same, and then you also have to take into consideration the fact that we all have made different choices as to what apps we want, and how we use our phones. These are all deciding factors in performance. So, I will still give you that this may not be a "Hangouts" issue, but something that happened around the time it updated/changed seems to be causing some of us issues. If it were say a continuity issue, like there was an interruption during download or install of the update/change it would seem that a factory reset would clear that up, but it's not. Wiping the cache, adding and removing widgets, and rooting hasn't helped. The only way to truly see if it is app related would be to factory reset and not reinstall any apps until it does or does not happen. Will I do that? Probably not... One I'm too lazy to set up my phone all over again, two I'm too attached to those things I don't want to loose, even if I haven't used them in a month of Sundays, and three as soon as I do someone will post that changing one arbitrary setting fixes it all. Oh and gives you the power to 3D print without paying Big Red a data charge. LOL.

 

[hgoldner#CB]

Fortunately, I have a Nandroid from early May which I was able to restore. After the restore, the HTC Sense crashes stopped altogether. I carefully noted all of the apps which were updated since that Nandroid, and have gradually, one-by-one added them back in (and you can bet the update from Google Talk to Hangouts will be the absolutely LAST thing I do). So far, the message has not returned, but I have 32 other apps to update before I get there.

 

[LarryBauer]

Hgoldner, try removing a widget and adding it back on. That seems to induce the problem on mine. Actually I found removing and adding shortcuts brings the problem too.

Thanks for all your work on this!

 

[hgoldner#CB]

Hgoldner, try removing a widget and adding it back on. That seems to induce the problem on mine. Actually I found removing and adding shortcuts brings the problem too.

Thanks for all your work on this!

I did spark a sense crash on removal of a problematic widget (Memory Calc Widget, which produces other errors on both my Rezound and my tablet), which had not been running before I restored the nandroid. But adding a different widget didn't cause any problems.

Immediately after updating Facebook to the latest version I got a sense fc, so I rolled back one version. 18 more apps to go.

My name's Harold and I'm a flashaholic....

 

[RFclipse]

Looks like the Key Ring app was the problem child on my device. I got a few "HTC Sense Has Stopped..." errors this morning while using miscellaneous apps, but at some point I also got an error stating that the Key Ring app had stopped working. Strange thing is that I don't use the widget for this app and hadn't opened the app since my previous restart. Not sure why it was even running, but it seems as though this particular app was doing something in the background that was most likely causing my Sense issues. I noticed on their blog that a major overhaul was rolled out on 5/21 which aligns with when I began seeing the issues. I used My Backup Pro to freeze the app (an option that's only available with a rooted device), and I haven't had any more issues after a half day of fairly high usage. I'll report back if anything changes, but if anyone experiencing this issue has Key Ring installed, I recommend you remove that app to see if your issue goes away.