With Android 6, Google changed the way that a tablet app can identify its hardware by removing access to the wireless "mac address". Whereas Ocean previously could uniquely identify tablets in this manner, and use it for session management (like a username), this doesn't work in Android 6.
Fortunately, most tablets do not auto-update to Android 6, so the problem occurs only for certain tablets like newer Samsung and Lenovo tablets. In early July, we released a fix in version 125 of the Ocean tablet app that identifies tablets using a "hardware ID" instead. We highly recommend clients upgrade their tablets to v125 to "get ahead" of any potential Android 6 auto-upgrades.
If your tablets are running Android 6 and an Ocean app below v125, there are a few things that you might notice:
- General connectivity issues based on the sessions getting mixed up (if you have 2 or more tablets on Android 6 with Ocean below v125)
- Billing issues: if you notice redundant tablets on your month-end bill, it may be because your tablets changed identifiers and confused Ocean into thinking there were more tablets than in reality.
If you need help with either of the above, please contact ocean.tips/support and we'll help sort things out. You should also review your Tablets tab in the portal to ensure you don't have legacy registrations for tablets on your account.
Finally, in order to get ahead of the issue, next week we'll force upgrade all tablets below v125 to the latest version. If you have a large number of tablets running below v125, you may wish to upgrade them in advance. To learn how to do this, please refer to "Upgrading Your Tablet".