My students are encountering an error when connecting to apps using the companion app. The connection will fail intermittently, failing to upload a piece of media. It is not consistent, as sometimes it will not fail. However, removing that piece of media, will enable the connection, and the student can re-uploads it after connecting and it will work. The media type is not consistent (sometimes an audio file, sometimes an image), nor is the device type (some of my students connect using their chromebook, some with iPhones, some with Android phones). I understand that is not a lot to go on, but this issue is popping up with some frequency now, with about a 1/2 of my students encountering it regularly. This issue first presented approx 2 weeks ago.
When the media fails to load, are you receiving an error that the companion cannot retrieve https://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu/... or https://code.appinventor.mit.edu/...? If so, can you take a screenshot of the exact error message?
Also, if you have access to the browser's developer tools (some school IT block this), a screenshot of any error messages you see there would also be helpful.
Here is a screen shot of the error from a student's chromebook today. Unfortunately there is not much beyond can not load the file. As I mentioned before, this does not happen consistently, it takes 2-4 attempts and then the program loads.
To add, I do not have access to the developer's tools.
Hmm. So that definitely seems like a routing issue in that the sandbox running the Android app isn't able to reach the public Internet, and it's possibly ai2 specific. The standard handshake that has to occur involves both the browser and the app exchanging information via rendezvous.appinventor.mit.edu so they can establish a secure peer to peer connection. Once that happens, the browser sends instructions to the app as to what assets to load, which is failing in the screenshot. So it seems as though rendezvous.appinventor.mit.edu is allowed but not ai2.appinventor.mit.edu. However, you state that it is intermittent. I am wondering if intermittent here might be that projects without assets are working (since the companion only needs to reach ai2.appinventor.mit.edu to download assets) and projects with assets fail.
You may want to ask your IT group if they have rules set up in Google Apps for Education that would block managed Android device access to ai2.appinventor.mit.edu.
My IT department did update some rules recently that caused the conflict. Thank you for helping me identify and resolve the issue!
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