Parcel crashes when retrieved from Intent

Question

In analytics for our app we've noticed increased number of crashes for the getIntent().getExtras() calls. It's intermittent and we can't replicate that.

Crashes come in two flavours:

12  Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to invoke virtual method 'int android.os.Parcel.dataSize()' on a null object reference
13  at android.os.BaseBundle.<init>(BaseBundle.java:126)
14  at android.os.Bundle.<init>(Bundle.java:102)
15  at android.content.Intent.getExtras(Intent.java:5685)

and

12  Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException
13  at android.os.Parcel.nativeAppendFrom(Native Method)
14  at android.os.Parcel.appendFrom(Parcel.java:458)
15  at android.os.BaseBundle.<init>(BaseBundle.java:126)
16  at android.os.Bundle.<init>(Bundle.java:102)
17  at android.content.Intent.getExtras(Intent.java:5685)

Retrieving code is essentially as follows onResume() {... getIntent().getExtras() ...}. We check if the bundle in not null but it crashes before that.

We do pass a custom parcelable but extensive unit tests are passing for marshalling and unmarshalling that.

Interesting stats for those crashes are that it mostly happen for Android 6+ (72% of sessions recorded with 95% of crashes happen there). Also unexpectedly crash rarely happens on Samsung devices (73% of sessions recorded with only 10% crashes happen for that manufacturer).

This crash contibutes ~0.15% to the app crashrate with a rising trend (probably because increasing number or users on API23+).

Anyone encountered something similar or has a solution already?

Answer 1

Late update but better than never. Crashes went away. Solution I used can be found here: How to marshall and unmarshall a Parcelable to a byte array with help of Parcel?

To be honest I've removed some unnecessary parcelling and unparcelling from our app which might have also helped but I think the former solution is the relevant one.