Issues since Mobile SDK update

BACKGROUND: I have been working with a custom version of the Sugar Mobile application that is distributed to company iPads via MDM. The company have been using their custom distribution of the Sugar app for close to a year and we have released various updates to the app (through MDM) during that time.
The most recent release (known internally as their v.1.1.0 release) resulted is some (but not all) users having issues using the updated application.

Symptoms included:

  • Save buttons missing on Account or other module edit views

  • Saving Meeting records would cause the app to hang

The v.1.1.0 release that we had pushed to the devices was itself stable and did not have these issues. The problems were only seen on some of the devices that had been updated from an earlier release of the custom mobile app to the new release via MDM. The issues themselves were device specific (not user specific) and have since been resolved for affected users by removing the app and installing it again for the iOS devices.

This is probably the 9th update we have deployed in this way to iOS iPad devices, all previous updates went out fine however this release was the first time we had also included an update of the Mobile SDK.

NOTE: if I had to guess I would say that the local DB on the device had data that was no longer compatibile with the updated version of the app and began causing issues (perhaps with security) that prevented some buttons from displaying in the mobile UI.

QUESTION:

In this case the release included the SDK update and some custom changes we had made to the app so trhe SDK update was not deployed in isolation.  I wanted to ask however if others have experianced such issues following  an SDK update release of the Sugar Mobile app?

My goal here is to understand if we need to be careful with future SDK updates to prevent similar disruption in future as our client rolls out updated to the app via MDM.

  • In every Mobile SDK release, we avoid making breaking changes whenever possible and if we do we will always document breaking changes.

    As far as I know, we haven't seen an issue like this before. As you suggested, it's possible that the local DB was somehow corrupted or there was some metadata incompatibility due to the server side changes.

    App Ecosystem @ SugarCRM