Releasing a cross-platform desktop application for major operating systems comes with its specific challenges.

After initial beta versions, our first Windows users reported a very strange bug. Their attempt to launch the release version of the app was failing with the following message:

java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError @ androidx.compose.ui.scene.skia.WindowSkiaLayerComponent.<init>(WindowSkiaLayerComponent.desktop.kt:53)

Despite the release build failing, the development build we provided worked just fine, making it challenging to debug and troubleshoot. Moreover, the failure also occurred before the Sentry was initialized, which made it impossible to get any details of the remote client.

After some attempts, we were able to reproduce the issue and introduce a fix in v1.1.0. We will post more in-depth engineering posts about this issue, but the TL;DR version is that our packager was not extracting necessary third-party tools due to misconfiguration.

Upgrading the maxDEV to v1.1.0 will resolve the issue. If you are facing similar issues, feel free to reach out via help@maxdev.biz.