Android Accelerometer Not Working When Screen Is Turned Off

Android accelerometer not working when screen is turned off

Basically, it is a problem with my phone. Other users have reported this also happens with their phones, from different brands but same Android version. Other persons have no problem at all - strongly indicating that this is not a problem with the stock version of android but from the implementations of each company for their hardware drivers.

I need constant accelerometer data delivered and cannot have a dongle measure this data for me - I have an Arduino with Bluetooth and accelerometer, so I could have implemented this solution. So I decided that the temporary solution for my cellphone was to let the screen on (dimmed) and ignore battery consumption. Later on I will perform the tests for battery usage using another android phone which works with the screen turned off.

More information about the bug

I've researched some more and found reports from other Android users and I think maybe I understand what is happening. The library libsensors.so which has the drivers for the phone sensors is not developed by Google but by each cellphone vendor - of course, because each cellphone has its own specific hardware. Google only provides a C header file so that the developers know what they have to implement. On some implementations for these drivers, the developers simply turn the accelerometer off when the screen goes off, thus preventing the sensor event listener to receive new events.

I also tested this with CyanogenMod RC7.2 but it did not work either, because accelerometer drivers are original from LG.

E-mails exchanged with HR department of LG

I sent an e-mail to the developers of the LG P990 and finally got some concrete answers! This may be of great help to some people like me that are experiencing these issues with Android. I wrote the following question

Hello! I am developing my thesis in computer science and currently I
am fetching data from accelerometer hardware. As of now, I found out
that the accelerometers do not send events when the screen is off, so
even when I grab a wakelock from within one of my programs, I can
verify that my program is still running (through LOGcat output) but no
accelerometer event comes out. I have to dim my screen on (which I
cannot afford, the battery drains too fast) to start receiving
accelerometer events again. I also tried accessing it through native C
code, registering on the accelerometer events but the result was the
same, the accelerometer did not throw any values, even though I was
rotating my device. So I was wondering if I could have direct access
to the hardware, with native code, without having to register to a
listener. Is this possible? If so, could you kindly give some further
advice? I would appreciate very much any help! Martin

For what I received this response:

Dear Martin, We received the answer from Dev. Team. They said that you
can’t get accelerometer event while your phone screen is off. Because
HAL layer didn’t implement sysFS path to get H/W event such as
accelerometer and there is no public API to get event. Thank you. Best
Regards. (Sean Kim)

I then sent an e-mail back, saying among other things, that I considered this a bug, since one should have access to all the hardware when acquiring a wake lock:

[...] I asked this question because I have some friends that also have
Android phones with the same gingerbread version but from other
cellphone brands, and some of them reported they receive events from
the accelerometers when the screen is turned off. I read on some
forums that this bug - I consider it a bug, since when I acquire a
Wakelock I would expect to have some processing going on - depends on
the sensor drivers that the vendors implement for their cellphones. Is
there any possibility that these drivers can be updated or will this
bug be corrected at some point? This would help me enormously with my
ongoing work [...]

And then I received this answer:

In my knowledge from Dev. Team, That isn’t bug. That is a limitless of
this phone because of H/W architecture. We need to redesign the HAL
architecture and device driver to support your request. But, as you
know that is too difficult due to lack of resource. We are trying to
help you with our all efforts but we cannot support your request as I
mentioned. (Sean Kim)

So they apparently know about this but are not trying to correct this because either they don't think it is a bug - which I still strongly believe is a logical flaw - or they don't have the time/resources to correct it.

Bottom line
If you have a cellphone that does not send accelerometer events with the screen off, try updating your firmware. If this does not solve and you really want to do some serious hacking, re implement your hardware layer - hint: it's probably something to do with libsensors.so.

Accelerometer onSensorChanged not called when screen is off

This is a documented issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3708

Unfortunately no easy fix exists and the workarounds also don't always work. It seems to be fixed in Android 2.3.3 for most (if not all) devices though.

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