getExternalFilesDir() returns null (not a permissions issue)
android
Solution
The problem went away after I restarted the tablet. It may just be some bizarre quirk that is extremely rare and fixed by a simple restart; I hope not, as I would like to have a solid way to prevent this instead of just hoping that any users who run into the bug are understanding.
Problem
I've been working on an app for some time, and have been testing it on many devices. Suddenly, it stopped working on the Motorola Xoom Family Edition (Honeycomb 3.1). Every time I would try to run the app, it would fail on the call to getExternalFilesDir(), as that call would return null instead of a File. From my research, anyone with a similar problem is either missing the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, never got an answer, or was talking about a bug in Froyo. None of that applies here--and again, it works fine on other devices, I have the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, and it was even working on this device until a few minutes ago. Any idea what might cause this issue, or how to programmatically prevent it?