Recently here at Windows Phone Central we have received several requests for help through our app from users whose Live Tiles have stopped updating, including our own . Previously, our application had bugs that caused its tile to crash, but when all the live tiles on the device that use background tasks get stuck, a big problem arises.
Up to this point, I have not been able to reproduce the problem myself, so I have tried my best to help those of you who ask us for a solution. Despite luck though my Lumia 800 tiles recently stopped updating at all (except for updates via push notifications) and after a simple reboot of the phone it didn’t help and I have a solution to share with you all.
There seems to be a bug in Windows Phone that silently disables all background tasks, leaving them in a state where the phone settings screen thinks they are still active. This isn’t usually a problem, as most developers have found that the safest bet is to re-register any background tasks every time the application starts to bypass the rather temperamental task scheduler in the operating system. However, with this error, the phone seems to accept the re-registration from the app, but actually completely ignores the request.
Luckily, although it’s a little painful, it’s easy to perform.
- Open your phone’s settings screen and select «background tasks»
- Click on each of the apps that say tasks are «on» and click on the «off» button
- Your phone should now have all apps with background tasks disabled
- Change: restart your phone! I had this problem now with WP8 and a reboot was necessary at this point
- Now click on each one you want to enable and click on the checkbox allowing them to be re-enabled
- Return to get each of the apps up and running, giving them a couple of seconds to register their tasks.
For those of you who prefer information at a glance, I have provided the following steps.
These steps seem to fix the problem, although I can’t guarantee for how long. I’ve confirmed that several apps are affected by this (the great BBC News Mobile and Weather Flow, to name just two high-quality apps), so I hope someone at Microsoft is aware of this issue and will make sure to fix it in a future update.