May have found a method for improving GO4 app stability for Android devices!

[GerdS]

I seem to now have possibly found a method for enhancing GO4 app stability on Android phones!
Today I have been able first time to fly 3 batteries with my Mavic down from 100% to 30% without the need for rebooting my phone between flights.

Problem:
Depending on how you will hold the remote while not looking onto the phone screen, the phone's orientation sensor may cause a screen rotation for 180°, at least for me. This happens quite often when flying on natural sight or using the DJI goggles.
Rotating the screen is a system-wide action which requires lots of processor power. Major parts of the GO4 app will be restarted every time it happens. I suspect that there might be synchronisation problems between foreground process and background processes, leading to memory leaks where not all previously allocated RAM will be released.
If this happens more often, the video display will slow down, some screen elements won't be drawn any longer and finally the app may freeze, crash or even freeze the whole phone.

Solution:
My idea was to install a further app which reliably prevents automatic screen rotation and keep orientation always same.
Fortunately there are many such apps on Google Play store for this purpose. I have used this one:
Smart Rotate: Screen Control - Android Apps on Google Play

Advantage here, you can define a screen orientatrion within the apps settings which will automatically be selected and locked as soon as an USB connection will be established, for the Mavic it is reverse landscape mode.
So, as soon as the phone will connect to the running remote, the screen will change into landscape orientation and after unplugging it will return to defauld mode.
When the GO4 app will start up even the main screen will be displayed in landscape mode and is no longer fully usable this way. But the "Go Fly" button is there and after tapping all looks as usual again and you can hold the phone in any way you want without the screen getting rotated.
This method will work for all drones, especially of interest for Spark users, too.

Ideally DJI should integrate the orientation locking functioonality directly into the GO4 app, putting an option into app settings to decide if the mobile device shall be locked in either landscape or inverted landscape mode after tapping onto "Go Fly".

 

[Brojon]

Ummmm - every phone I've ever looked at has a rotation control widget. I always locked rotation on my S7 and it didn't help. Also on my phone and tablet Go4 does in fact lock the screen to a landscape orientation.
Nice try.

 

[tcope]

The actual solution is to turn down the phones resolution.

 

[GerdS]

Ummmm - every phone I've ever looked at has a rotation control widget. I always locked rotation on my S7 and it didn't help. Also on my phone and tablet Go4 does in fact lock the screen to a landscape orientation.
Nice try.

Android does not include a standard setting for loking screen rotation which will be interpreted by the GO4 app. GO4 will lock to a landscape screen. I usually hold the remote with mobile almost horizontally with the screen a bit lower in direction to my belly. But as soon as the phone comes higher than the remote, the screen will rotate for 180°. This mentioned app will prevent this.

 

[Brojon]

Android does not include a standard setting for loking screen rotation which will be interpreted by the GO4 app. GO4 will lock to a landscape screen. I usually hold the remote with mobile almost horizontally with the screen a bit lower in direction to my belly. But as soon as the phone comes higher than the remote, the screen will rotate for 180°. This mentioned app will prevent this.

This is true of the initial screen but the flying screen is always landscape and will not rotate. So I'm not sure what you're dealing with. Anyone else have a phone/tablet that allows rotation when flying?

 

[Qoncussion]

This is true of the initial screen but the flying screen is always landscape and will not rotate. So I'm not sure what you're dealing with. Anyone else have a phone/tablet that allows rotation when flying?

Yep - Go4 won't rotate to all four possible positions, but it will flip 180° on the horizontal if the phone is tipped over.

 

[Brojon]

Yep - Go4 won't rotate to all four possible positions, but it will flip 180° on the horizontal if the phone is tipped over.

Now I get it - having never done that I didn't understand what was referred to.
Now given that this is an unlikely situation for most people I still don't see it as causing the lock up and such.
Mine locked up all the time and nothing worked. In fact my S7 when I reduced resolution stated that DJI Go4 wasn't designed to work with that screen resolution and may not function correctly.
I've not had one issue with my iPad nor iPhone 6.

Oh, I'd like to add that the display on Android is a weird beast and can cause weird issues - so I don't doubt for an instant that it could be at the root of the issue. For instance they introduced an app that "warms" the screen after dark to counter the blue screen messing up your rhythm or what not. anyway, many apps had issues with that including one that recorded phone conversations.

 

[tracer bullet]

This might work for some folks, I'd read it elsewhere and tried it but it didn't help me (Nvidia Shield with Nougat). At the time I'd prop the tablet at 45 degrees against my camera bag and not touch it, and also have "auto rotate" turned off in the tablet settings as well. DJI app would still crash frequently sometimes even seconds after starting it. Admittedly I did not know of or try this particular app and so maybe it is indeed a solution, when I say "I tried it", I didn't exactly try it this way. Hopefully others still having issues with nougat will give it a go and succeed!

(Having gone through all the forums, ideas, and etc. to have the app fail flight after flight after flight, and finally go through the hack route and made it work, I'm not willing to try any more solutions.)

As others found, reinstalling Marshmallow solved it 100% for me as well. I wish we could know what changes were made to the OS from M to N, if we could find the culprit we could probably fix this. There do seem to be a rare lucky few people for whom it works but it appears for the majority to be a problem. Wish we knew what they did differently... Also wonder if the recent Oreo release will work, but I've no idea when Shield owners will see it.