android - Cordova - white screen after splash, no exceptions in console

Question

I've been away from my Cordova app for a bit, but just did a fresh clone yesterday and noticed that it's got the "white screen of death" symptoms -- the splash screen displays, the program loads... and then I just get a blank screen. Some more details:

• CLI: Cordova 6.1.1, android 5.1.1, ios 4.1.1
• I'm not using any special plugins to display a splash screen -- just <splash> elements in my config.xml file.
• This is happening in both iOS and Android, both on local builds and using PhoneGap Build (i.e., debug and release).
• There are no exceptions of missing resources in the console, either in iOS (using Safari's dev tools) or Android (using Chrome's dev tools).
• I've done a diff with my last known working build, and there's really nothing that pops out. I saw an undefined Underscore reference, but I backed that change out and it didn't resolve anything -- I think I'd see the exception in the console, anyway.

Has Cordova / PhoneGap done something recently that might be causing this? Any ideas on how to isolate this one? I'm really stumped.

Answer 1

Well that was ugly. It turned out that there was an exception being thrown, it was just being thrown too early for the browser dev tools to pick it up (Safari, Chrome for iOS and Android, respectively). The exception did show up when I ran things through the browser target (cordova platform add browser, etc.) So that browser platform is useful for something I guess. :-)

In my case, the cordova-sqlite-storage plugin had made a breaking API change that broke the code when I updated everything. The solution was to pin the plugin to an earlier version in the config.xml file.

So, lessons learned:

• If you suspect there's an exception being thrown during startup, you can use the browser platform to track it down.
• Pin your plugins to a specific version using the spec parameter in the config.xml. This will save you some heartache in the future.
• [another option from @jcesarmobile, below] hitting refresh in the browser dev tools will also kick out the exception. Nice!

I'll be going back in to the config.xml and pinning the other items -- and doing some cleanup as suggested above. Thanks again, everyone.