Deck Builder 3.8.1 is a small, unglamorous release on Android and a busy one in the browser. On the phone it fixes one thing that mattered a great deal to the people it affected: on some devices the app would not open at all. In the browser version, a batch of features landed that close most of the remaining gap with Android.
The app opens again on devices where it refused to start
If Deck Builder failed to launch for you, this release is the fix.
The app schedules a little background work: syncing your decks if you use Cloud Sync, and the day 1, 3 and 7 reminders. On a small number of devices, asking Android to set that up threw an error the app did not expect, and because the setup happened while the app was starting, the whole app went down before anything appeared on screen. Nothing you could do would get past it.
That normally happens on devices whose Android version reports itself as newer than it really is, which is common on app cloners, container apps, modified builds and some emulators. Deck Builder now treats scheduling as something allowed to fail: if the device cannot do it, background sync and the reminders are quietly skipped and everything you do in the app keeps working. Losing a reminder is a far smaller problem than losing the app.
Under the hood
The rest of the Android changes are invisible on purpose. The libraries Deck Builder draws its interface with moved from preview versions onto released ones, which should mean slightly fewer odd rendering glitches over time, and the sign in and on-device text libraries were updated along with them.
In the browser
The web app picked up a lot since 3.8.0:
- Publish to the Deck Store from the browser, including publishing a new version of a deck you already published, and reporting a deck that should not be there.
- Upload a card back and cover art for a deck, instead of only picking from what is built in.
- Import a CSV and see which column is which, rather than trusting a guess, so a file with unusual headers imports correctly the first time.
- Keep more than one Pass and Play game at a time, so a game in progress survives starting another.
- A greeting on your first visit that offers the demo deck instead of placing it for you.
- Copy a card, or take one out, for the current game only, leaving the deck itself untouched.
- Decks now honour the play rules they were saved with, and a card keeps its own back-artist credit.
If you have not tried it, building a deck in your browser walks through the whole flow from an empty deck to shuffling and drawing.
Getting the update
The Android update arrives through Google Play. The browser version updates itself: open app.deckbuilderapp.app and you are already on the newest build.
If the crash was affecting you, or anything here does not behave, the Discord is the fastest way to reach me.
