Getting an error on recreate() inside onOptionsItemSelected() in API 23 / Marshmallow

Question

I am trying to make my App, which works perfectly on API<23 devices, to work on an API 23 device. It crash in the following senario. The user changes settings via options menu. If they tap slowly on the menu option (so there is time to see the option being highlighted), everything is fine, but if they tap briefly, the App crashes.
I know it's a quit strange behaviour and I have spend some time trying to understand what fires the error. The error occurs after recreate() which is in onOptionItemSelected. I put a timeout before recreate() to test if the option is "validated" but that didn't work. I can only think of some kind of bug in API 23 because it worked before with other APIs. Here is a snippet of my code (cut down to a minimum):

@Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) { 
   switch (item.getItemId()) {
      case R.id.menu_item_1:
            //... some code goes here
            recreate();
            return true;
            // some other options ..
    }
    return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
 }

After creating a new project with a blank activity and just adding inside onOptionsItemSelected()

if (id == R.id.action_settings) {
    recreate();
    return true;
}

the app still crashes.

Here is the logcat:

10-20 23:12:10.062 3217-3245/? E/Surface: getSlotFromBufferLocked: unknown    buffer: 0xab3d1b80
10-20 23:12:11.050 3217-3245/? E/Surface: getSlotFromBufferLocked: unknown buffer: 0xb4013030
10-20 23:12:11.075 3217-3245/? E/Surface: queueBuffer: error queuing buffer to SurfaceTexture, -19
10-20 23:12:11.075 3217-3245/? E/EGL_emulation: tid 3245: swapBuffers(324): error 0x3003 (EGL_BAD_ALLOC)
10-20 23:12:11.075 3217-3245/? A/OpenGLRenderer: Encountered EGL error 12291 EGL_BAD_ALLOC during rendering
10-20 23:12:11.075 3217-3245/? A/libc: Fatal signal 6 (SIGABRT), code -6 in tid 3245 (RenderThread)

"I have an error message" -- please post the Java stack trace or other error message. — CommonsWare
I still don't what is problem by seeing logs but recraete() can be replaced with invalidateOptionsMenu() — dex
I have already tried invalidateOptionsMenu() but it doesn't do the trick of recreating/refreshing the page. I use it for refreshing menu options and it does work well for that purpose. — Vega
Here are potential solutions from another related post on SO. It might help. — artekcs

Vega Vega · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-19T09:36:41

This was indeed a bug. After I reported, it has been since fixed by Google. It can be followed here: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=195966

Meantime my workaround is to replace recreate() by:

    Intent intent = getIntent();
    finish();
    startActivity(intent);

But the reload is not as smooth as with recreate() (I can see a little flashing).

Getting an error on recreate() inside onOptionsItemSelected() in API 23 / Marshmallow

1 Answers