TFG (The Foschini Group)

Debugging Android crashes across a national retailer's in-store and app KYC rollout

Integration Engineer Mar 2025 – ongoing

The problem

TFG’s live consumer app was crashing outright on several Android devices when opening the biometric capture screen, and separately suffering a laggy frame rate on others — both regressions in a shipped, customer-facing KYC flow. Their planned in-store rollout also targeted POS terminals with no Google Play Services and cameras as low-spec as 0.3MP.

My approach

Isolated the crash to a fundamental Android activity-lifecycle mismatch rather than an SDK bug, and separately traced the frame-rate issue to a dependency conflict between two camera libraries sharing the app — not something either team would have found testing their own code in isolation.

What I built

A confirmed fix requiring the app’s main activity to extend a different base class, plus a build-level dependency override resolving the camera lifecycle conflict. For POS terminals, recommended a web-capture-in-webview path as a hardware-tolerant fallback to the mobile SDK, alongside a bundled ML approach for devices without Google Play Services.

Outcome

Both production-blocking Android issues resolved and confirmed fixed; POS terminal path scoped with a documented device compatibility matrix, unblocking the next phase of the in-store rollout.