Lobstersteve (the developer of the engine used for this game) suggested it may be the result of an unrecognized controller. What model of controller are you attempting to play with? I use an xbox controller to play Pocket Platformer games and haven't yet run into any issues.
Also, thank you for the kind words!
EDIT: I was able to test and confirm that unrecognized controllers do result in the game crashing or having otherwise weird behavior. Lobstersteve updated Pocket Platformer to disable unrecognized controllers so they no longer crash, and I've updated Tala's Pocket Adventure to use this version. However, controllers besides the standard Xbox/PS/Switch gamepads are still unsupported, so rather than crash the game, they'll just do nothing.
This means you can now use remapping software to assign the keyboard controls to your controller without the game crashing. I personally recommend AntiMicroX, it's the remapping software I use for everything, and it's free/open source.