AIR for iOS app works perfectly in emulator, not at all on an actual iPad

Question

I'm new to mobile development, so I'm hoping I am doing some simple wrong, like a wrong checked box or something.

I have an app that I have written for iPad. It's fully functioning when I run it through the emulator (I have to change it to Flash 10.1 and use Device Emulator because nothing else will accept touch events) but doesn't really work on the iPad. Some of the features work, and some don't. It's like it's just not quite compiling all the code, and I'm very confused.

My publish settings:

Player: AIR for iOS
Script: Actionscript 3.0
Included .swf, .xml, and all relevant .as class files
Published using quick publish for device testing

Are there some AS 3.0 features that won't work in iOS? If so it would be really great to have a list of those somewhere.

What am I doing wrong? Why won't my app work on an actual device if it tests perfectly in the emulator?

Ambari · Answer

I am going to copy and paste this answer into all of the forums I've asked this question in case some noob like me comes along and needs the answer.

I found the problem! After 3 months I finally figured out what was wrong and why my app was working in Device Central when exported as Flash 10.1 and not on my iPad when exported as AIR for iOS.

The problem is that in the Flash runtime, if a line of code returns a bug, the flash runtime says "Error, shmerror, try again next time." So I had one if, else statement that was executing when it wasn't supposed to be - only once, at the very beginning of the program. It was throwing an error. When I exported as Flash, flash didn't care, and still executed the code later when it was supposed to. But Apple won't let their programs crash. So instead of just trying that code again, Apple decided, after the first error was thrown, that it would then COMPLETELY IGNORE that line of code. So the error was in the line where the states would unhighlight themselves. Apple just shut down that line of code, that's why it wouldn't execute properly.

I ended up changing this line of code

if (lastObjOver != null && lastObjOver.isLocked == true)

which threw an error when the piece was FIRST dragged over the puzzle, to to this

if (lastObjOver.parent != null && lastObjOver.isLocked == true)

which wouldn't throw the error.

Problem solved!

If anyone else is having this problem, I suggest you do what I did. Change all your touch events to mouse events so you can run the program in the adc debugger. That's when I discovered the error being thrown.

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