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We built a game (that's a couple of weeks away from being submitted to Apple) and all this time we've been play testing / debugging on GSM phones (AT&T). One of use got a new iPhone 4 on Verizon. When he's on the 3G network, the game will launch to menu but if the use pushes "Play" nothing happens. However, if he joins a wi-fi network then pushes Play the game starts normally.

Has anyone encountered anything like this? We're fairly certain it's a software issue but have been searching the Internet for any info on what exactly the issue is.

aviraldg
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masterclam
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  • Without knowing what "Play" does, it may be hard to narrow this down. Does it stream a video from the web? Do something else? Given Verizon's network doesn't allow simultaneous use of the phone and data networks, could this be a factor? Have you been able to replicate this issue on more than one Verizon phone, and ensured that it isn't simply a configuration issue like having cellular data switched off? – Duncan Babbage Nov 18 '11 at 21:27
  • Thanks for the follow up. It's not cellular data, we checked that. :) It's a game that uses GPS to track the real time location of the user to put them in an open world game with other users. What I mean by "Play" is that the app will launch so the user is at its Menu screen. When they push "Play" to actually initialized the GPS and enter the game world, nothing happens. On the backend, they don't connect to our server, nothing. We figured it might have to do with Verizon not allowing phone and data but how would that be tied to GPS? Wouldn't that be just data? – masterclam Nov 18 '11 at 21:41
  • Have you tried debugging on his phone already? If so, any insights from that? – pepsi Nov 18 '11 at 22:45
  • well that's a bit tricky because he's in a physically different location than our engineering office so he doesn't have the source code with him – masterclam Nov 18 '11 at 22:58

2 Answers2

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We found out the problem! We changed ports. CDMA (Verizon) doesn't like port 4444, so we changed to another (random) one of 32545 and success! Thanks to everyone and remember kids, CDMA doesn't work on port 4444.

masterclam
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You need to figure out what specifically in your app is causing the game to fail to start. If you are not getting anything logged then there is presumably an error that is not being handled.

Given starting a game requires geolocation, my guess is that on the Verizon phone getting an accurate location fix is taking longer than your app expects and it is silently timing out, or that it is initially returning a location of 0.00000000, 0.00000000 and your app isn't liking that. When on Wifi, location services may be providing an instant initial estimate of location based on the known location of the Wifi network, which would then avoid the issue.

One way to test this would be to hardcode the location or seed an initial location into the app on launch, and see if this fixes the issue.

Duncan Babbage
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  • since the person having this problem is in a different office very far away from our engineers and he's not an engineer (e.g. no debug kit with him) we can't just say "debug it". but we'll use your suggestions for sure and see what happens. We did have him connect via wi-fi then wander off until he switched over to 3G. The moment he switched to 3G we could see server side he wasn't disconnected but he also wasn't updating. Once he came back in range of wi-fi he started updating again. – masterclam Nov 18 '11 at 23:21
  • okay the problem isn't the timeouts, it's that the phone doesn't send anything to the server. He isn't disconnected but he also isn't sending anything or receiving anything. – masterclam Nov 21 '11 at 19:05