I am no fan of updates and my most recent experience just confirms that. Of course some updates are necessary and justified, but most create more problems than they solve (just think Crowdstrike!). Unless it is patching a big and serious security hole, I like to wait until all the bugs start coming out of the cracks. I can not and do not claim any special expertise in this matter. I can only say it has worked well for me for nearly fifty years!
The latest example concerns TiviMate, a streaming product I and many others like a lot. Although I normally keep all updates turned off, bloody Google Play managed to sneak one past me that killed a number of streams I rely on, like ABC Australia and Rakuten CNN. There is an active thread about this on Reddit but I don’t post on Reddit so I am offering a solution here and if Redditers don’t think Geekzone is worth their while, I guess that is just tough on them.
The buggy TiviMate update is to version 5.1.0, which from some posts I am seeing seems to be causing multiple issues. Mine is that I have suddenly started getting ‘Illegal State Exception’ errors on some IPTV streams on my Nvidia Shield. What the hell is an illegal state exception? I have no idea but this is what I have been seeing in place of my usual streams.
Unfortunately, TiviMate updates cannot be rolled back. This is a huge shortcoming of much modern software and I very much wish developers could be forced to include it (I tried to sideload an older version over my existing one but couldn’t). The only way I could step backward was to uninstall version 5.1.0 (losing all settings, playlists and other data – a great argument for backups!) and start from scratch with an older version (I chose 5.0.4, which had been upgraded from). At least nearly every version of TiviMate that has ever existed is easy to find on APK Mirror!
The downdate fixed the problem. No more illegal states and now I can concentrate on putting everything back the way it was. Sheesh.
