Enabling "Show taps" in Android Developer settings causes Android Apps to crash

Bug Reports
1

REPRODUCIBILITY: Easy
OS VERSION: 5.2.0.15 (Finlayson)
HARDWARE: Jolla Phone 2026
UI LANGUAGE: English
REGRESSION:

DESCRIPTION:

Enabling “Show taps” in Android Developer Settings causes Android Apps to crash all the time.

PRECONDITIONS:

Go to About phone and tap the Build number until Developer → System → Developer options

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

Go to About phone and tap the Build number until Developer → System → Developer options

  1. Enable Show taps

  2. No longer able to open the Android Settings

  3. Android apps keep crashing

EXPECTED RESULT:

See the taps in best case

ACTUAL RESULT:

Crashes instantly

MODIFICATIONS:

None

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

2

To compare I tested the same with Jolla C2 and could not reproduce that on that device. 5.1.0.11 installed.

EDIT: Actually my Jolla C2 started to function similar way. I can open e.g. Whatsapp but App Support starts crashing. No seeing the way to remove the setting

3

Back on FOSDEM ‘26 this year, I got to finally play with AppSupport for the first time on one of the display Xperia 10 II/III devices they had there. My gut tells me that I actually managed to switch the show taps option in developer options because I remember that AppSupport started crashing and I could never get back into the settings to revert the option.

If anything, 1. sorry for whoever’s device there got hit with this bug, 2. maybe I should’ve reported it right there :DDD

2 Likes
4

That setting killed my AAS totally. If somebody have the hint how to hack the settings I would be appreciated. It seems that reinstalling the App Support does not help.

5

As a disclaimer I don’t know if this will work, but it might work for you

From this thread you can load an Android shell with

devel-su appsupport-attach /system/bin/sh

This needs AppSupport running so maybe start it without loading any apps (and hence tapping on the screen inside of one).

If you can get a shell, i found two search results that might be able to disable taps

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49056918/how-to-enable-show-touches-developer-option-from-adb-shell

gives:

content insert --uri content://settings/system --bind name:s:show_touches --bind value:i:0

(from inside the shell the adb shell is superfluous)

While this newer link

https://medium.com/@sulavtimsina/adb-cheat-sheet-5e579f5651db

gives

settings put system show_touches 0
6 Likes
6

On this forum there should be a possibility to give 100 hearts for very valuable answers. @rgp answer was perfect and prevented me to do any extra work like reflashing the phone.

I used the commands:

devel-su appsupport-attach /system/bin/sh

And then in adb shell:

settings put system show_touches 0
exit
2 Likes
7

@scrumpy do what @rgp suggested and don’t forget to mark his post as a solution for this bug report.

1 Like
8

Thank you so much for the solution, I was being reckless with the Android developer options. I learnt my lesson.

1 Like