I just popped out to grab an image for a post, then realized I didn’t have a photo app, then went to the play store to download Ente, then decided I should just download an image directly… by the time I got back, Voyager had been closed and the draft was (apparently?) lost.
Any idea of how to prevent this from happening in the future?
And where is the draft supposedly saved?
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Oh shit, your title made me think Voyager was shutting down.
Fuck, Apollo flashbacks.
Anyhow, sounds like a problem with your OS, rather than Voyager.
And now I have to go breathe.
Honestly it is not just an OS issue. Mobile apps need to expect to be memory evicted in general any time they aren’t in foreground, so they should preferably handle state restoration well.
That said, I don’t mean to sound demanding.
This is more of an operating system issue.
Correct. This is the OS on the device that doesn’t have enough RAM to swap between the two apps and hold whatever they’re trying to copy into memory. Wouldn’t happen on a device with more physical memory.
Then where are the drafts that Voyager is saving?
Voyager’s drafts are weird. To use them, you need to find the same comment/post you were replying to when the app closed and try replying again. It’ll automatically restore your previous text and (AFAIK) immediately delete the draft.
There is no way to view or save your drafts, nor know or jump to the comment/post that it applies to. I’m also not sure if they’re persistent beyond the first time you open the app after a crash. The whole system is one of Voyager’s rougher edges.
The clipboard is basically the first thing to suffer. It’s the most expendable thing you have.
This is what I meant by suggesting you’re attributing this to the app you’re interacting with more. Are you mainly noticing this with comments disappearing when you switch to other apps before you can submit them?
Your device may be at the limits of its working memory.
It dumps itself if there’s not enough RAM available and there never is. Voyager doesn’t save your scroll/community position unfortunately and it just puts the draft up when you start writing your next post - no matter where you are.
There could be a little section for drafts? Fact is, I cóuldn’t find my draft anywhere, and another user here says they never find theirs either.
As far as OS, I think I’ve had apps that never close out. I always assumed they dumped themselves to a swap file until I opened them again. ?
Pay attention to them. They’ll lose context sometimes. Safari reloads tabs. You lose your place in Facebook or whatever. App Store goes from a search result to the homepage. Happens all the time. Some apps are better about saving context than others.
There should be a drafts section saving the post context, I agree. No idea how it would be done.
Yeah, I freaked out a bit just now because CPU 9 crashed on my Mint box and I thought I’d lost my post in Firefox, but it was right there when I opened the right history tab.
I think I’m just going to avoid leaving voyager mid-composition. I can add external links and media after I submit.
It’s a common issue for me, connected to some other common issues. I lose my place multiple times a day, lose entire drafts when the app decides to blank itself out and reload the feed on its own, and still have the problem of accidentally going to the communities list and then losing my place in the feed when it forces a refresh. And yeah, good luck finding your drafts, I never can.
I’ve liked this app for the most part, and have been using it since I came over from reddit years ago, but frankly I feel like it has not improved over time, and has in fact gotten noticeably buggy and counterintuitive as it has matured. Might be time for me (and you) to try out some others, I’ve been off the market for Lemmy apps for so long that I have no idea how the other apps have progressed.
Edit: I’m on iOS, iPhone 16 Pro, no shortage of memory as far as I know.
I spent an hour composing a post today; 20 minutes in I remembered what happened yesterday and finished it inside a text editor.
It may partially be an OS issue, but I couldn’t find my draft in Voyager, which is a Voyager problem.
Also have to say I’m pretty disappointed in this community. It’s great at describing how Voyager works, but most any suggestions for Voyager is met with cold indifference at best.
100% agree. My only two full posts, on this account and my previous instance accounts combined, were to this community about issues that seemed to me to be easily fixable, and lots of people chimed in to agree, but nope, indifference.
Voyager troubleshooting steps:
- Have you tried a different app?
- Have you tried programming your own app?
I have a similar issue when opening a website from voyager in Firefox. When I return to voyager, it’s closed and boots back up.
Does this only happen with Firefox? Is Firefox the main other app you use? I mean, do you mostly use Voyager and Firefox, or do you use other apps more regularly?
It’s pretty normal for an app to dump its memory, and you may be attributing this to the app you use a lot, because that’s where you’re noticing.
Yeah, just when I press “Open in Firefox”. Switches over to FF, opens the page normally and when I try to go back to Voyager, it restarts from scratch.
Android?
Yeah, but more often my Galaxy Tab A than my Pixel.
The reason is that Android is a piece of shit. It’s so obnoxiously memory inefficient and kills apps all the time. I restart my phone regularly which helps. At a point it will unload my home screen app as soon as I open another. Sometimes it unloads the stock launcher too (used for multitasking)
But, like, Windows 98 had a swap file for memory. Why doesn’t Android in 2026? This is my stupid question for today.
Android (sometimes; some ROMs have it disabled) uses a system called zram where a portion of memory is compressed to store more data. This vastly increases the amount of memory available nearly for free, but the system doesn’t play well with swap and actually degrades performance when both are enabled.
The other historical problem was that enabling swap on a phone could rapidly wear down flash storage such as EMMCs, but that’s not as much of a concern these days.
That is not my experience with any of my android phones or tablet.
Seems like their might be something going on with yours.
I’ve gotten recommendations to turn off battery optimizations. Graphene or android seems to have gotten a bit better with not killing apps, especially with regular restarts (3-4 times a week)
Just turned off optimization for Voyager. We’ll see what happens, but, honestly, since getting closed out and a draft will be lost is a possibility, it’s probably best to adopt a behavior that assumes it will happen.
Any update one day in?
Yes! At least as far as information goes. From the nostupidquestions lemmy (see post history), Voyager isn’t a proper Android app but basically a web page (???), so it doesn’t have the same granular system access an app might and its behavior might be more limitted in that regard, so, yeah, lean on OS solutions here.
I also got a recommend to try Interstellar.
But what the heck, let me open a few tabs and get back to you in two minutes.
Edit: I saved this comment, opened a bunch of stuff, and came back to Voyager saying it closed and that it noticed I was editing but to just “begin composing.” So, yes, I’d say avoid leaving Voyager at all costs while writing or compose in an editor.
Yeah, it’s solely Voyager’s fault (or at least the underlying cross-platform frameworks it’s built upon). Gracefully handling app lifecycle events so this sort of thing doesn’t happen was literally the first topic covered in the Android documentation back when I learned it. Android provides plenty of tools to save and restore state when an activity is destroyed, but I guess it’s hard to hook into them when the Android app is just a wrapper around an embedded web app?
Voyager is the only Fediverse app I’ve tried that has this problem, for the record.
Neat, thanks
I think iOS basicially closes an app when you leave it, and that’s partially the reason they have such good battery life.
If you have a custom ROM like graphene, or Volla’s ROM I think by default the settings are similar to iPhone where basicially nothing runs in the background and doesnt constantly ping home to google. You have to dig in the settings and let it happen.
If you have a low spec phone that might be another reason it closes it out when doing another task.
It’s a low-spec tablet… it caught me a bit by surprise, because my GOS Pixel is a champion.
I can only assume thats just the nature of it then.
