App Updates rarely download in China

[Matthew Exon]

In general when I try to update my apps they completely fail to download. They just sit at "0%".

I don't have much insight into the what's happening under the hood, but I'm going to go ahead and say that it's the GFW, even though it doesn't seem much better when I'm connected via a VPN.

The should provide more insight into what's going on, especially when the system detects that downloads are slow. I should be told which address it's trying to download from. I should be given the option to download it some other way and put the files on a USB stick or something.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

This sounds a lot like bug #1378678 which is presumably fixed in ota7
You could tryrecreating your U1 account to see if it makes a difference

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

I tried it this morning and it suddenly worked. That's the pattern with this problem, I'll try it a few times and it won't do anything, then wait a couple of days and it'll be OK. The reason I bring up the GFW is that I tried several times when I was travelling around Europe, using crappy hostel wifi, and suddenly it worked much better. I don't know if all that proves it isn't bug #1378678, but it doesn't sound like the same problem.

Anyway, my point is not to make downloads suddenly work. My point is that the system doesn't give me any insight into what's going wrong. I can't see the failing URLs, so I can't judge if they're inside or outside China. The system doesn't seem to notice that the attempted download isn't working. And I don't have any alternative means of getting the data onto the phone. Networks suck sometimes, users understand and accept that. But the system should know how to cope anyway.

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

I still have this problem, this time while trying to upgrade the system from OTA 8.5 to OTA 9. So it can't possibly be Bug #1378678.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@yc do you have someone who can reproduce this for us

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

Two points:

1. To both check for and to download updates, my phone should not have to communicate with any server outside China. It's just the reality here. Servers outside China may work from time to time, but if you're providing services to users inside China you have to assume they don't. If Ubuntu can't provide servers inside China, never mind. There's no point investigating something we know won't work. If Ubuntu can and does, then please verify (or give me instructions on how to verify) that the system automatically configures itself to use them.

2. The secondary problem is that the experience is still not good when it's unable to contact the servers. I tried it just now. It spins for a long time and then says "Connect to the Internet to check for updates". I'm connected to 4G right now. There should be a mechanism for sideloading updates from an SD card or something similar, because network failures of all kinds are a fact of life.

So while I think it's interesting if other users in other cities (I'm in Chengdu) are equally affected by this problem, I just want to emphasise that it's not really the core issue I'm pointing to here.

[Jonas G. Drange (jonas-drange)]

On 6 April 2016 at 07:00, Matthew Exon <email address hidden> wrote:

> 2. The secondary problem is that the experience is still not good when
> it's unable to contact the servers. I tried it just now.

​From looking briefly at the code, it seems we're doing this networking
inside System Settings. Maybe this could be moved to UDM if [1] is fixed,
which could greatly improve the experience if today's experience is
affected negatively by System Settings being subject to the app lifecycle.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-download-manager/+bug/1405517​

[Evan Wang (wsy324)]

We also met the same issue on OTA image upgrade in Beijing office before, because of the network connectivity in Beijing office is not very stable sometimes, so not very sure if it's related with the bad connectivity in Beijing, but seems the OTA image upgrade issue is worse recently if there is a bigger size of image updates to be upgraded,

In the very beginning, OTA image upgrade works no matter with/without VPN network,

For now, OTA upgrade works only with the VPN network and the image updates size have to be less than 10MB around, but sometimes also need to try more times. If with the non-VPN network, the downloading process goes to 100% directly, then get the popup "Installation failed"
If the image updates size is bigger than 10MB (like upgrade for crossing many builds), it's hard to success even though with the VPN network, the downloading will be interrupted easily.

Found some abnormal lines in logs of application-legacy-ubuntu-system-settings-.log and ubuntu-push-client.log, hope that could help.