Maybe some of you have had the same problem?
I have been using Jepp View using a Samsung 10.1 Tablett which I originally bought for this app only as an EFB. Since the last navdata update, something has broken and I keep getting the message “There is a problem with the update, downloaded file can not be decompressed”. The manuals are properly downloading and installing but the chart merging process gives the above message.
I sent the description to Jeppesen and got a very disappointing answer: “No, we are not supporting Android anymore in any version and there is no way your system can be repaired.” In other words, they want to force me onto I-OS which is something I will not do under any circumstance.
What I gather by googling my way through is however that Nav TC mobile appears to still work for those who have it installed and that the chart file I downloaded has been corrupted for some reason and is now blocking the app. Has anyone got an idea how to cure this?
The other bit I am really wondering about is how to continue to use Jepp View or to give them the boot altogether. I am royally pissed off by their behaviour to arrogantly stop supporting Android which must have a market share of more than 50% in the portable market and handing an unacceptable monopoly to Apple. In other words, they do not want the millions of Android users as their customers. Unfortunately, I see the same tendency with other supplyers such as Foreflight, where I could actually use the subscription I have.
So how can I still use my now useless Jeppview subscription using Android? Is there any app which allows to use this license as Foreflight does? Or is there some Android wizzard amongst our user base who can tell me how to get my existing app working again? I already am considering putting Peter’s old portable PC to use failing that.
Thanks a bunch.
Is the android tablet rooted?
If you install a proper file browser (e.g. Root Explorer; doesn’t give you root privileges if the device is not rooted, but is still way better than the crappy native Files app) can you see a folder called Terminal Charts and/or EnrouteData?
I ask this because the Jepp tablet products tend to use the same data as the PC product (Jeppview, FliteDeck, the old Flitestar).
By the way, sorry to hijack the thread, does anyone know if Jeppesen database formats have been reverse-engineered? The most interesting would be charts.bin, because the rest can be more or less obtained from open sources. One could do it, for example, by decompiling JeppTC into Java.
I have never heard of anybody having reverse engineered the database format.
Depending on how they coded it, you might have a horrid job writing the renderer. Jepp use all kinds of dodgy stuff like full stops (periods, in US-speak) of various font sizes to generate filled circle symbols… this is why if you have any issues with downloading fonts to the printer, the terminal charts come out corrupted.
The whole thing was designed to render readable terminal charts on an 800×600 tablet, which nobody has done before or since, and it requires a lot of specialised rendering techniques. The program comes with a set of special fonts, for the symbols, and the text.
OTOH their database might not contain any of this stuff.
@Peter, Jeppesen uses custom fonts for many map symbols (e.g. obstacles), and PDF charts from FliteStar have these fonts embedded in the PDF. I know it because these symbols can turn into letters if you use the wrong kind of output driver. On Windows 10, these fonts seem to reside in c:\ProgramData\Jeppesen\Common\Fonts.
As to charts.bin, I suspect it may be in some kind of multi-compartment container format with chunks of PDF in it. After all, the inner workings of PDF (or Postscript) are perfectly suited to displaying terminal charts, the question is only about keeping many of them stored hierarchically within one file.
Peter wrote:
Is the android tablet rooted?
No. I will check for these directories however and possibly get a proper file manager. This is old android, 4.x, so unsure which ones will work.
Peter wrote:
I ask this because the Jepp tablet products tend to use the same data as the PC product (Jeppview, FliteDeck, the old Flitestar).
That on the other hand is very interesting indeed and might do the trick.
Root Explorer works great on my Samsung T705 with 4.4.2 running on it. I always buy the “Pro” (paid) versions of apps, if I actually use them. Removes the adverts etc.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
What I gather by googling my way through is however that Nav TC mobile appears to still work for those who have it installed and that the chart file I downloaded has been corrupted for some reason and is now blocking the app. Has anyone got an idea how to cure this?
I’m using Jepp TC on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 and so far it has worked fine.
In your case I would try Settings → Application Manager → JeppTC and press “Force Stop”, “Clear Data” and then restart the application. That should remove any corrupt data and force a complete reload of all info used by JeppTC.
Unfortunately, Jeppesen seems to have pulled Jepp TC from Google Play so you can’t just uninstall and reinstall it.
JeppTC (at least the Ipad version I had) had a simple means of side-loading the database, from a PC installation of Jeppview. The device didn’t need to be jailbroken (rooted); one used a free utility called Iexplorer to access enough of the file system.
But JeppTC is not the enroute map product. It just displays the terminal charts, and has no GPS moving map functionality.
There may be the .apk file out there somewhere…
Peter wrote:
There may be the .apk file out there somewhere…
As long as you have it installed, the APK file is on your device. On mine, in /data/app/${APP_NAME}/base.apk
System apps are in /system/app/${APP_NAME}/${APP_NAME}.apk
