Playback of Voice message stops whenever phone is rotated and changes orientation

[lullis]

Steps to reproduce

1. Start playing a voice message that you received.
2. Rotate the phone to change orientation portrait <-> landscape.

Intended result and actual result

What did you expect?

Voice message to be kept playing

What happened instead?

Voice message stops and reset (i.e, playing it again starts it from beginning)

Your phone model

Fairphone 3

Operating system version

/e/ OS

Application version and app store

F-Droid

Homeserver

No response

Have you submitted a rageshake?

No

[ZianeA]

There are many approaches to handling this. WhatsApp, for example, plays voice messages in a foreground service. Youtube, on the other hand, seems to handle rotation by pausing the playback after a delay. If the onResume callback method is called within that delay, the video is never paused.

However, after I've investigated the bug, I found other related issues:

DI issue:

VoiceMessagePlaybackTracker is annotated with @ScreenScope, so it's scoped to the screen (Activity). Whenever the system recreates the Activity due to configuration changes (including but not limited to rotation), Dagger injects it with a new instance of VoiceMessagePlaybackTracker. The problem is that the RoomDetailViewModel has a transitive dependency on VoiceMessagePlaybackTracker. Since the ViewModel survives configuration changes, which means it has a longer lifespan, its instance of VoiceMessagePlaybackTracker will be different from that of the Activity after configuration changes.

A possible solution to this problem is to add the playback time to the screen state instead of a separate object.

Other issues:

• There could be concurrency issues with the VoiceMessageHelper class. The RoomDetailViewModel invokes the startOrPausePlayback function from a background thread where it modifies the shared mutable variable mediaPlayer.

• Per the Android docs, it's recommended to release the MediaPlayer when not used.

[ouchadam]

closing as a duplicate of #4067, will be fixed with #4556