BridgePal Forum

Many thanks, John. With 17 handsets at the club, I'm not sure I can face doing a Factory Reset on all of them, then going through the APK procedure to get the Play Store app etc.

I installed Google's Android System Webview on all of them before I saw your reply. I think I'll leave it at that until after the next session. Last night the members didn't get the hand layouts on their handsets because I reinstalled Windows after uploading the hands to the server; hopefully I've fixed that, so they should see an improvement even if the keystroke response is still slow.

We're still the only club in the area (apart from the odd Brian user) which can display the layouts after each hand is played, so we can feel good about that. Thanks. There's one club in Surbiton which pays the Brian owner some ?5 a session just to do the scoring; they don't have a duplimator, so they can't display the hands; and I suspect that on top of that charge, each time the players enter the scores via their mobile, they incur a small transaction charge which goes to Brian.

It's great to have a free system. It's just a little depressing to discover that the practice of keeping up to date with the updates may not be the right thing to do.

Hi Gavin,

Are you referring to short delays (maybe up to a second) occurring when any key is tapped, not just the OK button, with normal response at the start of the session then getting gradually worse as the session progresses ? If so, then this is the androd WebView bug which appeared in recent versions of that component.

Yes, the posted instructions are for a normal android tablet, not the Amazon Fire which uses its own highly customised version of android. I had a similar query from another user and as a result experimented with my own Amazon Fire tablet (an HD 8 7th generation running Fire OS 5.7.0.0)

The entry for Amazon System Webview on my tablet shows version v100-4896-tablet.4986.127.37, however the option to uninstall updates is greyed out as you say and remains so even if you click Force Stop, clear Cache etc. As it happens, the BridgePal app works fine with this version but I thought I would experiment with trying to update the WebView with a different version downloaded from an apk archive site.

I first tried installing "Amazon System WebView_90.amazon-webview-v90-4430-tablet.4430.91.22.apk", downloaded from https://archive.org/details/amazon-system-web-view-90.amazon-webview-v-90-4430-tablet.-4430.91.22 . This failed to install, perhaps because it's an older version.

I then tried installing "amazon-system-webview-110-amazon-webview-v110-5481-tv-5481-154-25.apk" from https://amazon-system-webview.en.uptodown.com/android/download/101847171 . This successfully installed and BridgePal worked ok without delays.

I then tried a factory reset to see what effect that would have on the installed version. In fact, that restore the Android System Webview to an even older version (v84-4147-tablet.4147.125.93). Again, this worked ok with BridgePal without delays. Finally I tried updating to the V90 apk - the one that failed to install previously. This now worked, presumably because it's a later version than the installed version.

If it succeeds, downloading and updating the apk is much less hassle than a factory reset. However, the other user who encountered this problem was unable to install the versions of the apk describe above, so you may need to go the factory reset route.

I would also suggest disabling automatic updates, though I can't be sure this will prevent updating of system apps such as the WebView. If it doesn't then the only way to prevent updates may be to make sure that the tablet is never connected to the internet, i.e. use a standalone wifi router for bridge sessions and remove any other configured wifi networks. You can disable automatic updates as follows:

- click on Settings
- click on Apps & Games
- click on Amazon Application Settings
- click on Appstore
- click on Automatic Updates and untick the checkbox labelled Enable Automatic Updates

Please let me know if any of the above procedures work for you. Good luck.

John

Finally I managed to get ie8 running on Vista. I needed several upgrades to the Basic SP2 to make it install. They wouldn't install automatically but I found this artice https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/troubleshoot/developer/browsers/installation/prerequisites-for-installing-ie-9 and then I had to download the upgrades by searching for their KB number. Many thanks. Now seems to be working well.

Thanks for this. I am running SP2 Vista Basic which has ie version 7. I've tried downloading ie 8 but it just says not supported on this version of windows. It looks like I'm stuck.

Final problem? I'm trying to use BridgeScore with the BridgePal combination and I now get the following (attached). I've tried loading a 32 bit version of Opera and setting it for all default types but it won't take all the default options that Windows Explorer has (.mht, .mhtml and .url). Is this a BridgeScore issue?