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·4 min read

Clearer Errors and One-Tap Reports in Cloudist

A silent failure is the worst kind. A song stops partway through, a video won't open, a purchase doesn't go through — and you're left guessing whether it's your connection, your account, the cloud provider or the app itself. Guessing wastes your time, and it wastes ours too, because we never hear about the problem until you give up and tell us yourself. Cloudist Play and Cloudist Watch now close that gap: every problem is shown on screen, explained in plain words, and reportable in a couple of taps — whether you deal with it right away or come back to it later.

Notices That Say What Happened

Most problems show up as a short notice, the kind you've probably already seen if you've used the apps for a while. What's new is how long each one stays and what you can do with it:

  • Info and success notices stay for 3 seconds — a quick confirmation that something worked, nothing to act on
  • Warnings stay for 6 seconds, long enough to actually read before they fade
  • Errors stay for 10 seconds and include a Report button right on the notice, so if something looks wrong you can send it off before it even disappears

The idea is that the more a notice matters, the longer it sticks around and the more it lets you do about it. A success toast doesn't need your attention for long; an error does.

When Something Serious Happens

Some problems are bigger than a passing notice can carry, so instead of a toast you'll get a dialog — something that stays on screen until you deal with it, with a fix action when one exists, plus a Report button and Close. This happens for:

  • Your library's database couldn't be opened
  • Nothing in the queue can be played, or a video can't be opened
  • Your cloud session has expired
  • A purchase or restore failed — the dialog includes a Retry button so you don't have to hunt for the purchase screen again

These are the moments where a quiet toast in the corner just wouldn't be enough — you need to know, and you need a way forward. A dialog also won't let you accidentally miss it the way a toast might fade out while you're looking at something else; it sits there until you act on it, retry, report it, or close it and move on.

Settings → Recent Errors

Not every error happens at a moment when you're ready to deal with it. Maybe a notice appeared while you were busy, or you dismissed it without reading it properly. That's what Settings → Recent errors is for: it keeps the last 50 errors, stored only on your device, so you can review and report problems you missed later, on your own time. Each entry shows what happened and when, and you can open the report sheet for any of them, not just the most recent.

What a Report Sends — and What It Never Does

Reporting isn't a blind "send everything" button. Before anything goes out, the report sheet gives you a note field to describe what you were doing, toggles for what to attach, and a preview so you can see exactly what's about to be sent. Attach logs is on by default, since logs are usually what helps us actually find the bug. Attach screenshot is off by default, and it's only offered in the first place when a screenshot was actually captured — it shows the app screen at the moment of the error, and it is only sent if you turn it on. Sending a report requires being signed in, so we can follow up if we need to.

What's sent:

  • The error summary and its technical details
  • The screen you were on when it happened
  • Your app version
  • Your device model, OS and OS version
  • Your locale
  • Up to 5 of your other recent errors, for context on what led up to this one
  • Logs, if you left Attach logs on
  • A screenshot, if one was captured and you chose to attach it

What's never sent:

  • Your OAuth access or refresh tokens
  • Your device name
  • Advertising IDs

Logs go through one more step before they're attached: they're scrubbed of email addresses, tokens, home-folder account names and file names, so what we see is the activity that led to the error, not your personal details.

Announcements, in Your Language

Reports are about telling us what's wrong; announcements are about us telling you what's changed. Settings → Announcements collects what's new in Cloudist, with an unread-count badge so you always know when there's something waiting to be read, and it's written in all 44 app languages, so it reads naturally no matter which language you run the app in.

Get the Update

These changes are rolling out in the latest update of both apps — Cloudist Play 1.0.34 and Cloudist Watch 1.0.28. Learn more about Cloudist Play and Cloudist Watch, or grab them here:

Same apps, now a lot clearer about what's going wrong, and a lot faster to tell us about it.

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