We are planning to make an Android-only release with a few critical fixes. Could you please help us with testing if the packages work fine on your devices and if the crashes are gone?
One of the most frequent crashes on Android was caused by background saving going wrong. We’ve overhauled the saving service, fixing crashes when Krita was being shut down or when it is inactive in the background. To reproduce the issue one should have done the following steps:
Create an image and draw something
Minimize the app switching into app selection Android menu
[very quickly] Swipe Krita away form the screen.
If these steps done quickly enough, Krita would silently crash, losing the autosave information. With the new fixes, no crash should happen and next time you open Krita, it should provide you the recovery dialog [1].
Transform tool now supports touch
Krita is updated to support Android 15 and 16K-pages-feature. If you have an Android 15 device with 16K support, you can enable it and test the new package. It should theoretically consume a bit less RAM. Here are the instructions how to enable 16K-pages support on your device: https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/page-sizes#developer-option
[1] - We plan to change the way how Krita saves images on Android with its sandboxed environment. We want to always save the images into Krita’s local folder and make sure that they are always saved, i.e. that no saving operation would be needed. That is how most of the Android apps are supposed to work. You can follow the discussion here.
I initially tried to reproduce with 5.2.11 (git a4da714), I never lost autosave data but crashes happened when I tried several times, autosave dialog recovered everything as expected though. Unfortunately if this was the issue same happened constantly on this 5.2.12 build shared here as well.
Transform tool with touch seems to work quite well when touch drawing is enabled.
I don’t have a google device, as far as I could tell samsung didn’t have this on android 15, I might have missed it in dev options though I am not %100 sure.
Personally I dislike how most android apps save locally, it makes backing up a huge pain, especially with Android limitations of where you can access, I think “sketches folder” is the right idea if I understand it correctly. I like how CSP does it, it basically creates a folder named “Clip Studio Paint” in documents folder and auto saves there unless otherwise specified. It could be the same with “Krita” folder under “Documents” where we can just copy the entire folder for backup if needed locally and krita would have default saving area, I actually wanted to pitch this idea, happy to see it being discussed already
The recovery dialogue works fine for me in 5.2.12. I swiped Krita away quickly a number of times when drawing, and I get the recovery window every time I relaunch. So, seems good!
2. Transform tool with touch works very well. It’s much easier to use now after this update!
I wish to point out that enabling 16kb mode on the Google Pixel 9 series requires unlocking the bootloader, which would also wipe the user data on the device. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to do that with my device. :c Have you tried using an emulator to test 16kb mode?
I’ve got and Android 13 tablet and I’m wondering about testing the release. Can this be done without harming the already installed version that I depend on?
If you need to keep the installed version untouched, then you’d better try the nightly stable builds. They are technically the same, but with a different signature.
You are relying on a released version or a version from Play Market or a nightly version?
It seems like there is no major issues with this release, so I’ll just start unrolling the release on all Android devices this week! Thank you very much for the testing!
