Today I had a brief in-flight scare. The application I was using, Litchi, decided it wanted to crash or shutdown without warning. There was no "Application stopped responding" sort of message popup, it just quit.
I just stopped piloting, confirmed I had valid flight telemetry data on my R/C controller screen, and started the application again. Even more luckily, the application reconnected to the R/C controller without any problems.
The first thing I noticed after confirming the aircraft was responding correctly was that my map was not visible. Oh, but there is a tiny message barely showing up in that part of the screen. "Google Play services are updating" was the text.
So apparently, if an application is using third party things like Google Maps data, or even your application itself, may get a surprise update mid-flight. Android doesn't seem to really have a concept of "the thing I am doing right now is mission-critical, so don't do stuff that breaks my current activity."
In the Google Play store, you can disable ALL automatic updates. I have typically browsed the My Apps section to disable automatic updates for individual applications (see the three-dots menu in the upper right of the app's info page in Google Play).
The Google Play services is not an app, though; it is part of the OS. So I recommend you go to Airplane Mode or turn off all automatic updates whenever you're flying.
I just stopped piloting, confirmed I had valid flight telemetry data on my R/C controller screen, and started the application again. Even more luckily, the application reconnected to the R/C controller without any problems.
The first thing I noticed after confirming the aircraft was responding correctly was that my map was not visible. Oh, but there is a tiny message barely showing up in that part of the screen. "Google Play services are updating" was the text.
So apparently, if an application is using third party things like Google Maps data, or even your application itself, may get a surprise update mid-flight. Android doesn't seem to really have a concept of "the thing I am doing right now is mission-critical, so don't do stuff that breaks my current activity."
In the Google Play store, you can disable ALL automatic updates. I have typically browsed the My Apps section to disable automatic updates for individual applications (see the three-dots menu in the upper right of the app's info page in Google Play).
The Google Play services is not an app, though; it is part of the OS. So I recommend you go to Airplane Mode or turn off all automatic updates whenever you're flying.