I’ve got the Breww App installed on both a Fire10 11th Gen and a Fire 7 12th Gen and even with app permissions allowing access to the camera both of them just present a black screen when trying to access the camera with the Breww info box at the top and button at the bottom.
Has anyone had any success using the app on a Fire device or are the development team able to shed any light. If it can be made to work these devices are significantly cheaper than other options.
Cheers
Thanks for the question, Claire.
To be honest, Android app development is a bit of a minefield (in comparison to iOS), with so many different devices using their own “flavour” of the Android operating system and it’s a constant battle everytime a new device presents it’s own challenges. Often these are caused by the device simply being too underpowered to support what’s needed from it by the Breww app, which might well be the issue you’re experiencing here. For example, detecting & reading barcodes in real-time based on a live feed from the camera is far more resource intensive than watching something on Netflix which is what these devices are typically designed for.
I’m sorry that this probably isn’t what you were hoping to hear, but I’d recommend buying a better device, to be honest. I know this will more expensive today, but you’ll probably thank yourself when it works reliably & quickly and doesn’t need to be replaced in a year or two. iPads are of course some of the most expensive tablets you can buy, but in all honestly from our experience, you get what you pay for. We’ve had occasional reports of the app being “laggy” and these always are from cheaper Android devices where the problem appears to be the device itself, not the app. We never have problems like this reported with iOS devices, so they are what we would recommend.
We don’t have a Fire tablet in our suite of test Android devices at this stage, so we cannot say for certain where the issue you’re experiencing is coming from, and we don’t believe the black screen issue has ever been reported before. We can hopefully get one to test with in the future and look at adding support, but for now, I’d really recommend buying a more powerful device.
We’ve had great success buying refurbished devices from places like Backmarket in the past, so if that might be worth considering to get a higher power device for less than the cost of buying it brand new.
If anyone else on the community has used a Fire tablet before, it would be great to hear how you have got on with it.