Index ¦ Archives ¦ RSS

In the doghouse: Kineto Wireless

In the doghouse: Kineto Wireless for excessive peeing in the pool

Like many computer systems, Android applications can log information as they run. In Android's case there is a single shared log across all applications with each entry having a program/library supplied tag, a level (debug, warning, info, error etc) and the message itself. A developer can see the log by running adb logcat when you have the ADK installed - regular users will never see the log.

The folks at Kineto thought it would be wise to log signal strength information at error level every second or two, taking several messages to do so each time. You also get messages from their other components with a similar profligacy. Even if you disable their software there is still a fair amount of logging happening. (Just how much battery is wasted by all this?) And you can't uninstall it unless your phone is rooted.

This makes developing on a phone with their software very annoying since their messages drown out messages from your own code and other components you talk to. It also illustrates that their own developers don't look at how much stuff they are spewing since they would surely note it as excessive.

I did contact support who didn't answer. They did a release since then and if anything it got worse.

If you are a developer, this is one of those attention to detail things. Learn from their fail.

Contact me