This version adds no features. It fixes a visible home screen freeze, a gesture that didn't do what you asked of it, and a series of crashes — some of which struck before you had even seen the app.
Adding a widget froze the home screen
The symptom
Opening the widget list froze the home screen for a moment. On a recent phone it passed for hesitation. On a more modest device, Android declared the app unresponsive outright — one report reached us from a Motorola running Android 12.
The cause
To build the list, Sola loads the icon of every app that offers a widget. These icons aren't plain images: Android rebuilds them on the fly, shape by shape. On a Pixel 8 Pro that comes to roughly 7 milliseconds per app — close to four tenths of a second for forty-odd apps, and considerably more on a slower processor.
The problem wasn't that cost, but its timing: the work happened on the thread that draws the screen, and before the list had even appeared. Nothing could move until it finished.
The fix
Loading now happens in the background: the list opens immediately and fills in as soon as it's ready. The icons are also prepared once, rather than rebuilt on every scroll.
Measured on the same device, first open after restarting the app: the display freeze goes from 394 milliseconds to zero. Scrolling follows suit — the slowest frames drop from 97 to 20 milliseconds.
The panel closed instead of stopping at the top
From the bottom of a long list — widgets, apps — a firm flick to scroll back up closed the whole panel. Yet you had asked to return to the top, not to leave.
When a scroll thrown with momentum reaches the top of the list, speed is left over. That speed was handed to the panel exactly as if your finger had dragged it down, and taken for an intent to close.
From now on, only your finger closes the panel. A list coasting upward stops at the top and bounces, as it does everywhere else on Android. And if you're already at the top, a downward swipe closes it, as before. The app drawer already behaved this way: the panels now follow the same rules.
Crashes that depended on the phone
Android's settings screens aren't the same across manufacturers. Several of them, documented though they are, are missing from certain models. Sola opened them without a safety net: on those devices, the app closed.
The costliest case sat in the first-run setup assistant, at the step offering to make Sola your home screen. On a phone lacking that settings screen, the app closed at the very first encounter. It now falls back to the general settings, and the assistant finishes in every case.
In the same spirit, opening an app that has just been uninstalled now shows a message instead of closing the app. Fifteen such openings of external screens were reviewed.
Settings opened slowly with a high-resolution wallpaper
To show a thumbnail of your wallpaper, Sola loaded it at full resolution. On a recent phone, a wallpaper meant for horizontal scrolling is twice the width of the screen: over 40 megabytes in memory, to draw a stamp-sized image.
The thumbnail is now scaled down as it's read, and prepared in the background. On devices tightest on memory, that load could go as far as closing the app.
Also in this release
- The message shown when an app can't be found existed only in French, whatever your phone's language.
- System bars: removal of settings Android has abandoned, with no visible change.
How to get the update
1.0.15 is rolling out through the Play Store. You can force a check from the Play Store app, under "Manage apps and device".
Open on Google Play