icons disappearing from home screens... lil help

[Chillson]

this happened to me a bit ago, then i unistalled some of the most recent apps i had downloaded, and it went away. no doubt an app shouldnt be able to cause this, but looks like that was happening. i would try that and then once it seems to have gone away bring the apps back 1 at a time.

Do you happen to know what apps you deleted?

Yea I'm curious to know the same.

 

[DroidFairy86]

It doesn't give me the option to Force Quit. The "button" for force quit isn't active. Any ideas? This is driving me crazy!

 

[PJ_ED]

I found this in another thread posted by 640K:

"if you're at your desktop and all of your icons/widgets are missing, it is most likely because your phone is low on memory. running applications that slow the phone down, installing lots of apps and various other things can cause this.

you can force a fix without rebooting by force closing the home app by:

home - menu - settings - applications - manage applications - menu - filter - all
then find home and force close. you might want to try to clear cache/data on home, if it's available.

also;
home - menu - settings - applications - manage applications - menu - filter - running - menu - sort by size
will show you what the biggest memory hogs are. slacker radio takes alot of memory and so do other apps. force close those apps and/or clear their cache (not data) to see if that improves."

http://www.droidforums.net/forum/pending-submissions-questions/4497-missing-icons.html

My question now is: Why is my memory filling up? What programs are doing this and why did it just start happening? I have only done updates to older programs. I have not installed new ones for a while. I think my long term fix will be to start systematically uninstalling programs until I find the problem.

I would be willing to try and figure this out based on other users sending me a list of apps. Maybe I can narrow it down to one or two apps that are causing the problem that way. Maybe if I/we start by finding out what apps are the biggest memory hogs like 640K recommends. There has got to be a common denominator.

 

[skrump]

I had this exact problem myself a few weeks back. I was encountering the blank home screen after exiting from car dock mode- very strange! What I think was causing it was the beautiful Widgets clock that I had installed on my home screen. Its only a theory, but after I uninstalled BW the problem went away. the developers of BW have since issued an update to their app. I reinstalled the updated version, and so far, I haven't had any further blank home screen issues. I hope that helps!

 

[DeeMat]

This will bring them back without a restart..

settings > applications > manage applications > [menu button] > filter > running > "Home" > force stop.

Thank you for the information. Worked like a charm.

 

[papy72]

I found this in another thread posted by 640K:

"if you're at your desktop and all of your icons/widgets are missing, it is most likely because your phone is low on memory. running applications that slow the phone down, installing lots of apps and various other things can cause this.

you can force a fix without rebooting by force closing the home app by:

home - menu - settings - applications - manage applications - menu - filter - all
then find home and force close. you might want to try to clear cache/data on home, if it's available.

also;
home - menu - settings - applications - manage applications - menu - filter - running - menu - sort by size
will show you what the biggest memory hogs are. slacker radio takes alot of memory and so do other apps. force close those apps and/or clear their cache (not data) to see if that improves."

Just this morning I woke up to find two screens of widgets gone. I wish I had read this thread yesterday. Then at least I could have done some basic troubleshooting.

As is I just rebooted the phone and it all came back.

FWIW, I am running the GDE Hero theme and my last couple of installed apps were Droid Coupons and updates to the AudioManager Widget and Setting Profiles.

 

[skrump]

Well, so much for my theory. I'm back to seeing the blank home screen on my Droid as well...

 

[Colety]

Observations

I have had this problem before, I have kept a log of apps that have affected my Droid this way. I had to uninstall at one time or another, Advanced Task Killer ( a waste anyway), Lookout (another waste of space), Beautiful Widgets, ABC Organizer and Screebl. Mine ALWAYS occurred coming out of a dock, so now I have dockrunner installed and any time I DL a new app, I run dockrunner and make sure the icons do not disappear after. Have not had a problem since.
Interesting enough, I now run ABC again with no issues. To me it seems like combinations of apps cause it. It does this unrooted or rooted. Have not had an issue for 3 weeks and counting.

 

[Hoover]

This has been happening to me for about a month, I have a ton of apps installed too but I keep them all updated to the latest versions. I thought the problem started after I uninstalled Home++, but nobody has mentioned that as the culprit. I also have Weather Widget and another memory hog SportsTap, but I have had SportsTap since day 1 with the phone and the problem is recent. The Force stop on Home app saved me the reboot time but I would really like this fixed. Hoping 2.1 will do the trick.

 

[jsh1120]

Just a guess here, folks. I suspect, as someone else noted, that it is not an application that is causing the problem but a combination of applications. Further, I'm guessing that it may occur in a unique combination of applications running that results in the android O/S swapping out and then trying to recover (i.e. swap in to memory) the home screen launcher. If that's the case, it's a PITA to try to come up with the specific combination of apps that produce the effect.

According to what I'm seeing in the thread power cycling the phone appears to provide a temp fix but doing a battery pull may be more effective (Similar to powering off a pc rather than simply rebooting.)

And if all that fails, a factory reset would be the next reset. A tip. If you have to go that far, Find great Android apps and games - AppBrain is useful for identifying all your apps for reloading.

The next step would be hardware-related, I presume. Time for a trip to Verizon.

 

[pudah]

Just a guess here, folks. I suspect, as someone else noted, that it is not an application that is causing the problem but a combination of applications. Further, I'm guessing that it may occur in a unique combination of applications running that results in the android O/S swapping out and then trying to recover (i.e. swap in to memory) the home screen launcher. If that's the case, it's a PITA to try to come up with the specific combination of apps that produce the effect.

According to what I'm seeing in the thread power cycling the phone appears to provide a temp fix but doing a battery pull may be more effective (Similar to powering off a pc rather than simply rebooting.)

And if all that fails, a factory reset would be the next reset. A tip. If you have to go that far, Find great Android apps and games - AppBrain is useful for identifying all your apps for reloading.

The next step would be hardware-related, I presume. Time for a trip to Verizon.

Isnt there a log we can pull to see what happened just before this event?

 

[Hoover]

Just a guess here, folks. I suspect, as someone else noted, that it is not an application that is causing the problem but a combination of applications. Further, I'm guessing that it may occur in a unique combination of applications running that results in the android O/S swapping out and then trying to recover (i.e. swap in to memory) the home screen launcher. If that's the case, it's a PITA to try to come up with the specific combination of apps that produce the effect.

According to what I'm seeing in the thread power cycling the phone appears to provide a temp fix but doing a battery pull may be more effective (Similar to powering off a pc rather than simply rebooting.)

And if all that fails, a factory reset would be the next reset. A tip. If you have to go that far, Find great Android apps and games - AppBrain is useful for identifying all your apps for reloading.

The next step would be hardware-related, I presume. Time for a trip to Verizon.

That makes sense since I never turn my phone off, maybe it is happening over time. Is anybody experiencing this that turns their phone off nightly?

 

[cj1896]

I posted this question recently in the tech issues and no-one had a response. It gets progressively worse until I have to restart the phone. My guess is that it is cache/memory related. Part of what I don't understand is how for a day after my phone first loads it is fine but eventually using even basic apps causes the homescreen to go blank. Has anyone had this problem that uses a cache clearing app (like cachemate)?

 

[skrump]

This problem has been getting worse on my Droid, I'm seeing the blank homescreen every other day or so. I don't think the power cycling addresses this problem either- I have a second battery that I swap in on a daily basis, yet those blank homescreens keep popping up. Another shout out for the user who posted the tip about the home app kill work around, that's helped alleviate the annoyance level quite a bit! Love to get to the bottom of this, seems to be a fairly common problem. I've got a buddy of mine sitting next to me right now who also owns a Droid, and he says he's seen the blank homescreen on his as well...

 

[cj1896]

So I did a little experiment this week relating to this issue. I rode it out as long as I could in effort to actually accentuate the problem. I think it has something to do with the backgrounds on the phone. My icons kept disappearing for several seconds after using even the most benign programs and was getting worse and worse. Finally when I would exit a program/bring the phone out of sleep the background would actually default to the first stock non-live wallpaper. I tech savvy but I have no idea how the phone actually stores the home memory and wallpaper memory but it seems like there is something that doesn't quite jive there.