Database Develop

Ambient display question

I read this demo from Droid-Life about the Ambient Display feature of the Nexus 6:
http://www.droid-life.com/2014/11/0...-display-is-a-very-cool-take-on-moto-display/
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TyhaOjME5g
So, this supposed to replace the LED notification that we all knew already.
My question: When the phone receives a notification, the display will lit on showing the notification.
That's good.
But, for how long it is displayed?
I meant, I recall with LED notification, I could see it for quite long until I noticed that I got a notification.
Will the ambient display, display the "new" notification until we "touch" the display OR interact with it?
That would be ideal.
Anyone know?

Yep, it will appear each ca. 5 seconds for ca. 2 secs until you´ve marked it as read (or until battery is empty ).
So for me it´s kind of an smarter / advanced LED replacement
Only drawback is that it only makes sense with AMOLED display (Which we know the N6 is equipped with).

So, when a new notification came in ...
The ambient display will display the notification for 2 seconds ... then OFF ... then 5 seconds later appear for 2 seconds ... then OFF ...
Repeat the above until the notification is marked as read ... or the battery has run out.
Correct?
If yes, then I think this is better!

Sorry, now I´m not 100% sure anymore as I´ve seen your linked video. I thought that Google implements it like Moto indeeds blinks as I described, but on the N6 it seems to light up only (1x) on arrival of new notifications or if you pick up the phone. Fingers crossed that N6 will get kind of a permanent blinking mode.

Android police has a nice video showing this feature. The notifications do light up periodically after they come in. Something like every 5-10 seconds until you dismiss them. Picking it up does light the ambient display as well, but they will 'pulse' on their own.

Nice, was wondering how it will work. To me better then the led.

I wonder if dynamic notifications from the play store would work better in this situation.
Sent from my XT1053 using Tapatalk

biggiestuff said:
I wonder if dynamic notifications from the play store would work better in this situation.
Sent from my XT1053 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you used this on an amoled screen before? I'm curious the battery usage on it.

frigidazzi said:
Have you used this on an amoled screen before? I'm curious the battery usage on it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is the response I got from the developer. I've used it on my nexus 5 before and it didn't seem to make a huge impact on battery life but the nexus 5 doesn't have an amoled screen. I imagine on they nexus 6 that it would be less of a battery hog than the ambient display.
thanks for your message! The app automatically uses the low-powered motion detection chips on newer handsets. The allocation of computing tasks to low-powered processor cores is, to the best of my knowledge, performed automatically by the system depending on the situation, so I would imagine that the app does make use of them, as it is frequently in the background and doesn’t do any “heavy lifting”. The CPU/memory footprint of the app is minimal, as it doesn’t constantly query for new notifications, but is provided with them as they come in by the Android system.
Sent from my XT1053 using Tapatalk

biggiestuff said:
This is the response I got from the developer. I've used it on my nexus 5 before and it didn't seem to make a huge impact on battery life but the nexus 5 doesn't have an amoled screen. I imagine on they nexus 6 that it would be less of a battery hog than the ambient display.
thanks for your message! The app automatically uses the low-powered motion detection chips on newer handsets. The allocation of computing tasks to low-powered processor cores is, to the best of my knowledge, performed automatically by the system depending on the situation, so I would imagine that the app does make use of them, as it is frequently in the background and doesn’t do any “heavy lifting”. The CPU/memory footprint of the app is minimal, as it doesn’t constantly query for new notifications, but is provided with them as they come in by the Android system.
Sent from my XT1053 using Tapatalk
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Click to collapse
Thanks. I'm gong to have to try this out on n7 and n5 just to see.

gtalum said:
Android police has a nice video showing this feature. The notifications do light up periodically after they come in. Something like every 5-10 seconds until you dismiss them. Picking it up does light the ambient display as well, but they will 'pulse' on their own.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can't seem to find that video

With Ambient Display turned on and NO unread notifications, does the screen still light up when the phone is picked up (because that would be bad from my point of view)?

Mine is not breathing at all. The phone is locked and a notification comes in, it will light up the first time, but it does not appear automatically at timed intervals after that, only when you pick up the device.
Very disappointing..

mlapaglia said:
Mine is not breathing at all. The phone is locked and a notification comes in, it will light up the first time, but it does not appear automatically at timed intervals after that, only when you pick up the device.
Very disappointing..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Half the time mine doesn't even come on when picked up.

mlapaglia said:
Mine is not breathing at all. The phone is locked and a notification comes in, it will light up the first time, but it does not appear automatically at timed intervals after that, only when you pick up the device.
Very disappointing..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yep, that's exactly how it works for me too! The good thing though is that it lights up 98% of the time so I don't have any major complaints about it.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Do you not like looking at your phone and without having to interact with it know that you have a notification?

mlapaglia said:
Do you not like looking at your phone and without having to interact with it know that you have a notification?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have not gotten a "pulse" on it yet...it lights up when a notification comes in, and "breathes" a few times...but it seems to stop after minute or two...I don't see any settings to control this either.
I'd like to have a definitive understanding of exactly how it will function...

I did see the vid and from what i get out of it, sometimes when you pick up the phone the notification lights up, sometimes it doesnt. Not to mention, accelerometer/gyroscope sensor would need to be active at all times for ambient display to work.
A clear case of "if it isn't broken, don't f'king fix it."

Screen much brighter on one side

So. Recently got my second transformer. After a few hours use it switched off and refused to turn on at full brightness - in the dark i could just just see icons on the homescreen. After a while it seemed to tun on again. Crazy. So i updated to and used latest 4.4.2 stock for a day, the screen was working perfectly at all brightness levels, uniform, no light bleed. Then i flashed a few of the available CM based roms. This morning, a few days in, i notice that the backlight is much much stronger on the right.
At low brightness it was completely ridiculous. Its like one of the rows of leds wasnt on at all. So i reflashed a backup i had from install day and now everything is just fine - uniform brightness, working perfectly. It seems to be a driver bug. But how did it survive me going from kernel to kernel?
So now im wondering if its a hardware issue... any thoughts?

Ive now noticed this happening on a number of occasions to different rows of the backlight - sometimes at bootom, sometimes at bottom and right. Anyone else seeing something like this?

Sounds like hardware to me...

berndblb said:
Sounds like hardware to me...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I flashed the latest cm and this seems to have stopped happening so looks like driver issues. However, the screen continues turn off sometimes, and when it does it needs two presses of the power button to turn back on. Its a crazy thing asus - i had the last infinity too, sold it after a few months because it just wasnt as good as my nexus 10. And now this... pretty amusing.
Dunno why i keep buying asus. Must be my good experience with their motherboards or something... usually they also have excellent support and firmware updates.

Ambient display is useless

I found that ambient display is useless.
I was thinking that whenever I got notification, the ambient display will lit the screen and then OFF ... then lit ... then OFF.
You know, kind of asking attention.
It is NOT.
It lit ONCE, then OFF forever, until I pick up the phone (of course).
The problem with this, if I leave the phone on my desk for quite long, I won't know if there was notification arrived, unless I pick up the phone.
So, what's the use of this ambient display?
Damn, LED notification would be much useful!

gogol said:
I found that ambient display is useless.
I was thinking that whenever I got notification, the ambient display will lit the screen and then OFF ... then lit ... then OFF.
You know, kind of asking attention.
It is NOT.
It lit ONCE, then OFF forever, until I pick up the phone (of course).
The problem with this, if I leave the phone on my desk for quite long, I won't know if there was notification arrived, unless I pick up the phone.
So, what's the use of this ambient display?
Damn, LED notification would be much useful!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So you can either see the notification come in first time when it lights up. Or you can quickly pick the phone up to see if there are any notifications without it fully waking up.
LED is easier though!

I prefer they don't lit it on and off constantly because it is distracting when you are in a meeting and it drains your battery. Though having an option would be nice

Yeah, I agree it is a useless battery wasting feature (though the impact to battery is minimal). Thankfully the LED can be enabled with Light Flow even though that is flawed as well since the app will randomly get killed and the light won't work.
Ambient Display would be perfect if it flashed continuously until you check it and if it worked in priority mode, which it doesn't if you have priority mode set up like the old silent mode. If you don't want your phone making noise or vibrating but still need to see notifications it is pretty worthless.

you are dead on sir.
gogol said:
I found that ambient display is useless.
I was thinking that whenever I got notification, the ambient display will lit the screen and then OFF ... then lit ... then OFF.
You know, kind of asking attention.
It is NOT.
It lit ONCE, then OFF forever, until I pick up the phone (of course).
The problem with this, if I leave the phone on my desk for quite long, I won't know if there was notification arrived, unless I pick up the phone.
So, what's the use of this ambient display?
Damn, LED notification would be much useful!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was told Google is moving away from using led notification, but yet they designed a phone? with one built in but totally useless at this point. Hopefully the next update will address this.

Mine flashes continually until I check things... Every ten seconds or so. It is wonderful... Not sure what is up with your guys' one time notifications...

ambient display is alrite.... It doesn't work that well though. It does not consistently work when you pick up the phone. I would much rather have them activate the LED since it's already there.

you. me. and many more
tsy87 said:
ambient display is alrite.... It doesn't work that well though. It does not consistently work when you pick up the phone. I would much rather have them activate the LED since it's already there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm setting this gripe in many circles outside of xda hopefully they will address it in the next update. Lots of corporate people want that portion which was always a part of android and even non android phones of the past.

EmperorX said:
Mine flashes continually until I check things... Every ten seconds or so. It is wonderful... Not sure what is up with your guys' one time notifications...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So does mine

vvveith said:
I was told Google is moving away from using led notification, but yet they designed a phone? with one built in but totally useless at this point. Hopefully the next update will address this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
in all fairness, Moto made the phone, whether for Android Silver or whatever other reason, it wasnt designed ground up with Google or originally planned as a Nexus.
I like ambient. Works great for me. and being an Amoled display, only the pixels being used light up, so battery is minimal

users report otherwise.
CraigP17 said:
in all fairness, Moto made the phone, whether for Android Silver or whatever other reason, it wasnt designed ground up with Google or originally planned as a Nexus.
I like ambient. Works great for me. and being an Amoled display, only the pixels being used light up, so battery is minimal
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Click to collapse
Acording to the battery threads I've read, ambient display sucks battery.

mzimand said:
So does mine
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What are you guys using? Lightflow?

vvveith said:
Acording to the battery threads I've read, ambient display sucks battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does the device wake up from deep sleep for it? If yes it sure does suck a lot of battery. Especially if it is supposed to flash up in intervals to remind you of the notification.
jawmail said:
What are you guys using? Lightflow?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just tested it... it flashes up every 30 seconds or so. As soon as as you click on it the screen is on without any delay. So I guess it screws your battery hard by making it wake up each time? It would mean that as soon as you have a notification your device would wake up every 30 seconds.

I can't get Lightflow to work at all. Do you need a kernel that has LED support?

jawmail said:
What are you guys using? Lightflow?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am just using the regular ambient feature built into the stock rom. I am encrypted, rooted with stock kernel on stock 5.0.1. I have not messed with any AOSP roms .

jawmail said:
I can't get Lightflow to work at all. Do you need a kernel that has LED support?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Rooted and use root access for the LED activated in Lightflow.
Lightflow screws up ambient tough. It constantly flashes as if it has an notification, even if it only shows the clock. This WILL kill your battery in my opinion...

Led notification will drain batttery fast?
Via my NeXus™ 7FHD on XDA Premium app

I actually like it more than Active Display. Active was much more sensitive to movements which for really annoying.
Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

Alienfreak said:
Rooted and use root access for the LED activated in Lightflow.
Lightflow screws up ambient tough. It constantly flashes as if it has an notification, even if it only shows the clock. This WILL kill your battery in my opinion...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know what settings you set to make it do that.
Light Flow doesn't do that here. Cooperates fine with Ambient.

I know there are people (Lightflow Dev) who are working on getting the built-in led working, and I think that's great. I wonder if there are any devs working on making Ambient Display more useful...? I'm going to shut off the Ambient Display today and mess around with an app I used to use on the Galaxy S called NoLed. It puts dots or icons on the screen and could notify me of anything... might be the ticket here.

Strange Adaptive Brightness issue

Off late I'm noticing that whenever I turn on the display, it goes completely bright for maybe 5 seconds before adaptive brightness kicks in. Today I completely reset my phone and reflashed the latest factory image (MRA58R, I was on MRA58N previously). It was fine for a while (for a few hours) and now it has started behaving the same way. It works fine if I turn off adaptive display. This happens 90% of the time.
Has anyone else faced this?
---
I have filed a bug report, please star it.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=196048

I've got the same issue on 6.0 stock not rooted. I've been fiddling around with lux trying to get it to stop going to max bright in low light settings... And it seems that the light sensor is getting incorrect readings in low light and it takes a few seconds for the sensor to start showing accurate levels for the light conditions. I would love to have adaptive brightness work as it used to - don't know what changed.

Same issue here.

Woah. I'm not alone. So for all you guys, it started just recently?

yeah. I noticed it a little less than a week ago

Do you use Gravity Box?
Issue came with that mod for me and even after removing it my Adaptive Brightness still doesn't work properly.

foxnutz said:
yeah. I noticed it a little less than a week ago
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm. Same here. Started last week. Will have to dig out what the root cause is.
altimax98 said:
Do you use Gravity Box?
Issue came with that mod for me and even after removing it my Adaptive Brightness still doesn't work properly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope. I'm running completely stock, no root, even locked bootloader (for device protection feature).

I am running completely stock marshmallow no root, boot loader is locked, no gravity box. Same problem.
Is there any program we can use to monitor the readings at the light sensor is receiving?

I have tried two apps but that doesn't seem to gather data while running in background; only works when the app is opened. Still trying to find one that does background logging.

I have the same issue.
And I thought it was Gravity Box.... now I wonder if it's the November patch? Since there is report from people who never root and using stock?

Ok, so I found an app that can log data while in background. It's called Androsensor. It also has a companion app (Androsensor Keep Awake) which helps to hold a wakelock to gather more data. I tried it and I feel it's definitely not the sensor or it's driver/binary malfunctioning, it seems to be reporting proper values. Maybe more people can try it and report back.

i just bought my phone (brand new) update it right away to 6.0 and used it and having thesame issue!
that means this is google firmware problem!

The reason I believed it to be the sensor was because I used lux to try and fix this and noticed when the bug was occurring, as the screen just turned on and went to max brightness, lux showed the values from the sensor above 20000. Oddly enough if I had lux update every 3 sec it would sometimes capture the actual light levels on the second update and adjust accordingly. I'll check out the app you mentioned and see what shakes out.

I'm having it too, also completely stock and unrooted, first noticed it a few days ago. A friend of mine also has it. He is also stock, I'm not sure about his root status though.

Ok got some interesting results this morning using androsensor. First of all I was unable to recreate the bug while using the keep awake helper app... Which leads me to believe that there may be some issue with the sensor values being calculated/averaged by the autobrightness code/program as the device wakes up from sleep. perhaps android is shutting off the light sensor when the device goes to sleep and this causes a reset? So it appears that it's not getting wrong values rather, that the data being drawn from the sensor is reset or perhaps recalculated as the device wakes back up. Almost as if it can't remember the last light level that was observed. I uninstalled the wake lock helper and was able to recreate the bug by letting the device "sleep" (leaving the screen off for maybe 5 seconds). So while the sensor showed readings of 2 lux the screen brightness was increased erroneously until the auto brightness refreshed and then after a few updates on the sensor the correct brightness was applied to the screen. Curious results. Can anyone else try to recreate the bug using androsensor and the wakelock helper program? I'm hoping I didn't run into some user error there.

I too tried without the wakelock helper and got the same result which made me believe it's not the sensor that's causing it. Will try the same with the helper app and report back.

Just tried Androsensor with the helper and I was unable to reproduce the bug, exactly what foxnutz faced.

Alright so we got some results! Just for the sake of being thorough, can anyone else replicate these results that andr0idfreak and myself saw? It seems holding a wakelock on the sensor stops this bug.
Now where do we go from here? It's been an awfully long time since I've done anything with logcat... But I think that may be our best bet to find out what's really going on here. I'll have to do some homework before proceeding. Will report back.

I think we should file a bug report here.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list

I think a bug report is probably worthwhile. I thought it was some combo of xposed and gravitybox as well but I flashed my stock system back and it's doing the same thing.

Weird glitch when phone is in dark mode (colour shifting when taping display)

Hi everyone,
Got my Pixel 4 XL on the 23rd and been playing around with it since then. I am now settling into a rhythm and noticed a very concerning glitch with the display when the phone is in dark mode. Basically, when the phone is in dark mode I noticed that typing in Gboard or tapping anywhere on screen in apps that are not pure black (such as Messages, Phone, etc.) will shift the screen colour from blueish-black to greenish-black. This happens every time, even after rebooting the device. There is no visible colour shifting in apps that use pure-black such as Settings (however, parts of Settings like the search bar that are the "gray" dark colour also shift). Once I noticed this happening now I cannot stop noticing it everywhere. I am looking to find out from you whether you are seeing the same thing or whether this may be a device problem. Note that the same issue shows up in dark apps even if dark mode is not enabled. It also has nothing to do with Ambient EQ, Automatic Brightness, or anything else of similar nature. Occasionally the problem stops, but if I pull up Gboard and start typing (say to search in the Recent section of the phone app) the problem immediately comes back.
I am looking for serious feedback here from those willing to look closely. This does seem like a software glitch to me, rather than hardware, especially since I am not seeing this behaviour with any other colours and so far it definitely has something to do with physical interaction with the screen when tapping on it. As I said, it also seems to be universally triggered by Gboard when in apps running in dark mode.
I appreciate any feedback you can provide.
Edit: Looks like what I'm observing is related to the switching colour profiles when the display is going back and forth between 60Hz and 90Hz. Turning off the smooth display function or forcing the display into permanent 90Hz mode appears to stop the problem from happening. Google really messed this one up. I hope their 90Hz fix they promised clears up this issue. Very annoyed ?
Thanks,
Dejan

Btw, since you are using forced 90hz display make sure to have always on display on. If you don't your greys will be purple and lower brightness as well as lots of black smear/crush. I don't know how turning on always on display solved that issue (someone posted this fix in another thread). So it indeed doesn't seem to be hardware but software related and hopefully they will tune this over time.

zetsumeikuro said:
Btw, since you are using forced 90hz display make sure to have always on display on. If you don't your greys will be purple and lower brightness as well as lots of black smear/crush. I don't know how turning on always on display solved that issue (someone posted this fix in another thread). So it indeed doesn't seem to be hardware but software related and hopefully they will tune this over time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I saw that thread. Some funky stuff going on with display calibration and 90Hz. Since I know that the HW is not defective and the SW is the source of the issue I am less bothered now (I cannot stand exchanging HW). I haven't specifically observed that effect on my phone and while I did try forcing 90Hz, I actually went back to the stock setting since I noticed that forced 90Hz further sucked down the battery that already is not particularly stellar despite this being the XL version. I presume Google will refine the 90Hz calibration and function over the next few months. I will say though that I am a bit confused why they need to have different calibration at different refresh rates. I calibrate all of my desktop monitors and despite the fact that I have a 100Hz monitor I never have to change calibration with refresh rate. Maybe an OLED thing :shrug:

dhorgas said:
Hi everyone,
Got my Pixel 4 XL on the 23rd and been playing around with it since then. I am now settling into a rhythm and noticed a very concerning glitch with the display when the phone is in dark mode. Basically, when the phone is in dark mode I noticed that typing in Gboard or tapping anywhere on screen in apps that are not pure black (such as Messages, Phone, etc.) will shift the screen colour from blueish-black to greenish-black. This happens every time, even after rebooting the device. There is no visible colour shifting in apps that use pure-black such as Settings (however, parts of Settings like the search bar that are the "gray" dark colour also shift). Once I noticed this happening now I cannot stop noticing it everywhere. I am looking to find out from you whether you are seeing the same thing or whether this may be a device problem. Note that the same issue shows up in dark apps even if dark mode is not enabled. It also has nothing to do with Ambient EQ, Automatic Brightness, or anything else of similar nature. Occasionally the problem stops, but if I pull up Gboard and start typing (say to search in the Recent section of the phone app) the problem immediately comes back.
I am looking for serious feedback here from those willing to look closely. This does seem like a software glitch to me, rather than hardware, especially since I am not seeing this behaviour with any other colours and so far it definitely has something to do with physical interaction with the screen when tapping on it. As I said, it also seems to be universally triggered by Gboard when in apps running in dark mode.
I appreciate any feedback you can provide.
Edit: Looks like what I'm observing is related to the switching colour profiles when the display is going back and forth between 60Hz and 90Hz. Turning off the smooth display function or forcing the display into permanent 90Hz mode appears to stop the problem from happening. Google really messed this one up. I hope their 90Hz fix they promised clears up this issue. Very annoyed ?
Thanks,
Dejan
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just noticed this on my pixel 4 xl tonight. But It only happens when the proximity sensor is triggered. Ex: like after making a phone call except it made everything on the screen seem over saturated on the screen and well as the same color shift you had stated. It seems to go away once I lock the device and unlock it again. It did it with smooth display on and off as well as force 90hz on and off.

There are a couple threads discussing this. Here's one of them:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/pixel-4-xl/how-to/smooth-display-colour-issues-t4000087
And another:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3998907
Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk