Open Join seemed to kill my phone at midnight Jan 1st

So, literally as we rang in the new year here in Australia, my phone started acting up, and wouldn't let me swipe to unlock or anything. Screen would turn on, home screen wallpaper would appear, then turn off. I'd try turning it on again, and the same behaviour, or sometimes even just straight to homescreen wallpaper.

Notifications for messages still seemed to be coming in, but I couldn't even acknowledge those on the lockscreen. All touch input seemed to have been lost. Screen seemed to get quite hot too - probably CPU or GPU.

I rebooted the phone several times and still no better. I'm on a rooted Note 4, running 5.1.1. I booted into TWRP and cleared both the cache partition and the Dalvik cache, but still no better.

After sleeping on the problem, I decided to start renaming potential trouble apps (apps that run visible services, like Tasker, Join, etc) using the TWRP file manager, one at a time. /data/app/com.joaomgcd.join-2 happened to be the first folder I moved out of the way and, et voila! it worked again.

Any chance of a bug in the code that timebombed on Jan 1st 2016?

 

Can confirm. At exactly 12:00 I received a notification stating, "Join: Beta Expired: please update the app from Google Play to make it work again." and my phone was completely borked until I managed to uninstall the app.

 

Thanks for confirming. Was worried it was something specific about my phone.

 

Hi all.
Similar thing happened to my tablet "note 12.2". I am using join and another app called "Desktop Notifications" which send notifications from my apps to all my devices. Well, when I tried to switch the screen on the first of January my tablet didn't turn on at all. I had to force a reboot. However, every time I tried to reboot I got several "process com.system.mui has crashed" messages. The only way to restore my tablet was to go in titanium backup and freeze join (I had like a 40 secs window before the message started to pop up). After that, I cleaned the cache, wiped data and unfroze the app back. Now everything works fine. I noticed that Joint sent 1650 notifications to all my other devices in less than 1 hour (according to "Desktop notification"), so probably the crash was related to that fact.