F-droid Version 1.61.105-t7429e8912-g12210d3f26b crashes at launch

[joetul]

What is the issue?

The tailscale android app crashes immediately upon launching on both my nvidia shield and pixel phone.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Tailscale F-droid version 1.61.105-t7429e8912-g12210d3f26b
2. Attempt to open the app.

Are there any recent changes that introduced the issue?

No response

OS

No response

OS version

Android 14

Tailscale version

No response

Other software

No response

Bug report

No response

[ozls]

Same thing here with up to date GrapheneOS, Pixel 6a, no Google services

Edit: Here are the crash logs in case it's helpful

type: crash
osVersion: google/bluejay/bluejay:14/AP1A.240405.002/2024040900:user/release-keys
package: com.tailscale.ipn:201
process: com.tailscale.ipn
processUptime: 0 + 0 ms
installer: com.looker.droidify

signal 6 (SIGABRT), code -6 (SI_TKILL), fault addr --------

backtrace:
      #00 pc 00000000005258d8  /data/app/~~u9V2nbtzklnIV_8f4vBsOg==/com.tailscale.ipn-MJipTV3emdh3XVt6-9gQWg==/lib/arm64/libgio.so

[bradfitz]

That's the old version of the app. A rewrite is launching soon and is available as of yesterday for beta testing.

(These sorts of crashes are why the app UI was rewritten.)

[linsui]

@bradfitz Should we switch to the new UI? I was told to continue publishing the legacy app. Should I stop the update until the new app is ready?

[bradfitz]

Ideally F-Droid would pause for a bit until the new app is ready. It won't be long.

[linsui]

OK. 👌

[Zocker1999NET]

I understand & acknowledge that errors, in any way, can & will happen, so I don’t want to blame anyone with my comment. But in my opinion, this issue is critical & should deserve more immediate actions:

• on F-Droid, select the former, working version as suggested immediately, to prevent more users from running into this issue
• rebuild the last working version (1.58.2-tb0e1bbb62-gcd1f0649958) and push it to F-Droid as version something like 1.61.106-really1.58.2

I think those immediate actions are reasonable because this issue breaks Tailscale for all users using F-Droid & it is hard to revert that issue:

• Android, I think starting with version 13, has an app downgrade protection enabled. So it prevents users from just downgrading the app.
• Because the app prevents being part of system backups, I also cannot just remove the app & install a former version and then am good to go. Rather, I need to:
  • reauthenticate in the app
  • the app gets a new IPv4 assigned (admins may change that to the old one)
  • because the "old app" was not properly signed out, it still blocks the MagicDNS hostname, so I get there a new one as well (admins can fix that)
  • if Tailscale Lock is enabled, the app needs to be resigned

Ideally F-Droid would pause for a bit until the new app is ready. It won't be long.

@bradfitz can you maybe estimate more exactly when the new app release will happen? I cannot really determine if you mean something like 1-2 days or 1-2 weeks. (in case pushing the latest working version is not possible)

[bradfitz]

@Zocker1999NET, we at Tailscale are not involved in the F-Droid packaging or release decisions. We put code on GitHub and other people put it on F-Droid.

Our version numbering scheme is minor numbers that are even are stable (58) and odd are unstable dev releases (like 61). Apparently somebody put a random snapshot of in-progress code on F-Droid (61 is odd) that we never released or tested ourselves and it crashes. That's not code we would ship (and didn't ship to the Google Play Store).

So, yes, F-Droid should probably roll back to a stable release that worked. But that's not in my power.

I won't speak for the Android team on their schedule. But it seems to be moving very rapidly so I don't think it'll take two weeks. F-Droid should probably be ready to package it within a week.

[linsui]

I have disabled the crashed versions. But the users have to reinstall the old versions manually since Android doesn't allow downgrading. I checked that 1.64.0-t78dc8622d-gfd2ca6fa940 also crashes so it's not a problem of unstable version but it seems the legacy app has some problems. I'll wait until the new app is ready.

[bradfitz]

@linsui, we also never released 1.64.x to the Play Store. Or 1.62.x.

If you want to match what most our users are currently running on Android, you want 1.60.1-t2caffeeb4-g6f7ae79a31c (tailscale/tailscale-android@6f7ae79). That's the non-beta Play Store version.