2010-04-26

Experiencing an API bug the hard way

We (my wife, my daughter and I) enjoy Geocaching a lot. It's no surprise that I am using my own (Android) application for that. It's far from complete and it's just for my personal use but last weekend we wanted to show our neighbors how much fun geocaching is and I started to enter the first coordinate into my app and .... got an error.

I entered a valid coordinate like "7:59,149" and the app told me it's invalid.

What happened?

The class android.location.Location#convert(String) is buggy. It's not a big thing but it's really annoying. In the end I just copied the method from the Android sources into my own class and changed the validation condition. So my app is working again.

But learning about this bug this way I will always remember it. (It was so embarrassing!)