" The collection is empty" for all tags accessed through Android app

I receive a message that "The collection is empty" when accessing any of my tags through the Android app using my LG V20, and zero results are shown. I also see the same when I select "All Books" from the main "Your Catalog" screen. All book results are accessible when viewing by a Collection, or by Authors.

When viewing these results through the website, there is no issue. I certainly consider being able to access certain tags through the mobile Android app important. I could not find any info that an issue like this has been previously reported.

Just to verify, what account are you logged into when you go to the Home > Account page? I can dig further into this once I can verify, thanks.

I am logged into this account - username: GREGandDANICA. I did at least uninstall and reinstall the app, as well as log out and log back in, but same result.

>3 GREGandDANICA: Hmm, ok. I'm unable to reproduce on my end, but I have an iPhone. Going to see if our staffer using Android can test and then pass further along to developers to take a look.

Silly test, but can you try turning your phone off and then on to see if that changes anything? Thanks! Scratch that, we were able to reproduce on Android, thanks for the report! I'm passing this along for fixing and we'll post here with any questions or updates.

I will investigate further.

Any updates on this issue??

No updates yet. Still trying to find the cause in code.

No updates from this bug reported in June? Issue remains that the app does not show any items for "All Books" or any individual "Tags".

I'm afraid not, we're a pretty small development team for all of LibraryThing, TinyCat, and LibraryThing for Libraries. Thanks for your patience, and conceptDawg or I will update this thread with new information!

Issue still persists. Still disappointed I can't view any books by their tags.

>10 GREGandDANICA: I just checked that this doesn't seem to be a problem on my Android phone, so maybe this only affects a small number of Android versions?

I get the "collection is empty" if I click on a tag, but only when no books in my Your Library collection use that tag. In other words, browsing by tag only looks at the Your Library collection and nothing else. This is easy to verify for me, since I've mostly moved to ebooks, which I keep in their own "Ebooks" collection; the app itself says I have 586 books tagged "acquired 2021" but clicking in only shows two: the two physical books I've acquired this year. Likewise, clicking into any tag that I only use for ebooks (like "ebook", which the app says I've used 6,529 times) brings up the empty collection message.

My phone is stuck on Android 8.1.0, by the way.

>12 saltmanz: Nice bug description. I think all my books are in the "Your Library" collection, so that's why I didn't run into the bug.

saltmanz (#12):

Good bug hunting! I still cannot replicate the bug on my Android (using the tags "wishlist" and "borrowed from library" neither of which I use on books actually in the Your Library collection. However I'm on Android 12.

Installed the app on my tablet for testing purposes, and the books show up there as well. It's on Android 10. So either there are tag-specific subtleties or it's a version issue.

Giving to conceptDawg.

Bumping this, after receiving a similar report via email.

When accessing tags from Your Catalog, in the Android app, many result in a "The collection is empty" message, regardless of the number of books shown to have that tag, on the list of tags. I observed this behavior when logged in as myself, and as the member (fastaxion).

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Log into Android app (username: "AbigailAdams26" or "fastaxion")
2. Select Your Catalog
3. Select Tags
4. Choose a tag

Every single one of the tags gives this message, in the "fastaxion" account. In the "AbigailAdams26" account, only some give this message (i.e., -17th-century children / 1840s / Abenaki folklore), while others display some books, but far fewer than they should (i.e., the Aesop tag should have 47 books, but only displays 2)

Note: The member also reported having trouble syncing the app and website, when it comes to tags: when added on the site, they did not appear on the app, and vice versa. I have not been able to reproduce this, testing in both their account and in mine.

I am on a new phone, new Android version (11) since this original report and the issue is the same for me. All books with tags are in the same "My Library" collection. I have 201 different tags, and all have at least 1 book (most have 8-10, some have 50+, some 100+).

Edit: to add to the above comment #17, I also tested adding a book through the website (The Pesto Cookbook) and while it appears in My Library on the website, it does not appear in My Library in the app. However, I have never had an issue seeing books on the website that I have added through the app.

Edit #2: I have my app list sorted by Date Added, so I should see this newly added item at the top. It's not there. However, when I search the list, it comes up. When I click on it, I see a message that says "There was an error retrieving the details. Pull down to refresh and try again." and there is no data below like collection, tags, publication, member tags, etc.

Edit #3: Checking back after about 30 minutes after adding the new book through the website, I now see it in My Library in the app.

Assigning to ccatalfo.

Steps to reproduce at >17 AbigailAdams26:

There hasn't been any public activity on this in a bit so I want to report that I am also having this issue as a brand new user (I didn't even know LibraryThing existed a couple of days ago and I want to say that I'm super happy with it). My phone is Android 13 and I have been adding books with my phone (when possible) but I do all of my actual library management through the website. I am not using the "Your Library" collection.

I have some extra information to add. Here are different steps that I have taken on my phone with their results.
- Click Your Catalog > Tags > then any of my tags = app tells me "The collection is empty"
- Click Your Catalog > All Books > then any book that I know has a tag > then click the tag = app shows me a properly filtered list of books by the tag

Reactivating the "Your Library" collection and adding a book with a tag to the collection fixes the issue for that book. A workaround appears to be to put everything that I want to track the tags of in "Your Library" so that the tag filtering works on the app. I don't know if this helps any.

>21 darius52: " A workaround appears to be to put everything that I want to track the tags of in "Your Library" so that the tag filtering works on the app. I don't know if this helps any."

That's not necessary. Much easier to simply type in the tag name via search if you want to get the behavior you would expect the from Tag UI in the app. From Your Catalog (in the search field) type in Tag:tagname, if you don't remember a tag name you can still use the broken Tag feature to lookup the names :D The bug is verified and assigned and all that needs to happen is to have the Tags search default to 'All Books' and not 'Your library' - but app bugs seem to have a low priority, especially Android for whatever reason.

>22 Taliesien:

I didn't know about that, thanks! I'll figure out what works best for me since I'm currently not sure how often I'll look at my books by tag. I'm not surprised about app bugs having a low priority, thankfully this is a minor issue with workarounds.

>23 darius52: I'm not surprised about app bugs having a low priority

FWIW, that's not quite the way to look at things. Apps are different from the web site in two ways. One is that the nature of the code is significantly different -- as I understand it, LibraryThing is coded in PHP and the data stored in SQL. An Android app is usually written in a Java variant and an iOS app in Apple's pet languages (Objective C and Swift). So a person who works on the one may not be able to work on the other.

But the other thing is that LibraryThing can roll out its own code to its own web site. Not so with the apps. Google and Apple have to approve apps that go on their app stores. I am quite sure that the LibraryThing apps are not malware :-), but they still have to go through the process. So imagine that LibraryThing fixes one bug in the Android app. They have to submit it and wait for approval. What if they find another bug before it gets approved, or if their fix turns out to itself have a bug, and a worse one? The cycle starts over -- and, meanwhile, the buggy code is out there.

So, in general, updates to apps -- any apps -- will tend to roll out a lot of features at once, because it takes just about the same amount of time to get a major update approved as a minor one. It's the nature of app store ecosystems.

To be sure, it does sound as if the Android app has languished for a long time. Longer than the above would explain. But those bottlenecks can also influence how developer time is allocated, particularly at a lean organization like LibraryThing.

This is the same bug, reported earlier than this one, with a different symptom but same root cause -> https://www.librarything.com/topic/303348