Alarms when the phone is shut down?! Surprise! (running latest official LOS)

[Roboe]

Today is holiday in Madrid, Spain. It’s the Feast Day of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, for the curious.

So I turned off my phone yesterday night, after updating it to latest LineageOS^[1] (2018-05-09) in the morning. I though that would be a quick way to disable my daily alarms altogether, but to my astonishment my phone rang this morning at the usual time (although without my custom alarm ringtone).

The feature still seems to be unstable: I dismissed the alarm and it crashed, showing me an option to restart the Clock app, after which the phone got a purplish, unresponsive screen and I needed to manually reboot the phone. But it is still good news, because it may be stable in the near future and could help us sleep better (schedule and turn off your phone before some media or content call your attention and ruin your sleep times) and possibly escape the always-available smartphone trap.^[2]

The boot-up alarms where a quite demanded feature for the FP2, specially for those users coming from a FP1 —which has this capability— or a feature phone. To be fair (unintended pun), Fairphone OS & Fairphone Open got this capability too in some update hidding after a flag in the Developer options:

Alarm not starting if FP2 is off

What you can do is enable QuickBoot mode: first enable Developer options by tapping the Build number ten times in Settings -> About phone. Then go to Settings -> Developer options and enable QuickBoot mode. Now turning your phone off won’t actually fully power it down, and the device is able to wake up for an alarm.

but it was unstable at that time:

Endless boot process after I turned on "QuickBoot"

##Workaround: Right now, the only tipp to avoid this is: Turn off QuickBoot! The Software team is investigating the issue and will hopefully be able to include a fix in an update soon. If you are stuck in the endless boot process you can try the following: Wait and see. (For many this is in fact not endless, but resolved itself over night.) Keep your phone plugged in and an eye on it for the first hour or so to make sure it doesn’t overheat. Otherwise abandon the wait and see strategy. Tak…

I don’t know the current state, though: official OSes for the FP2 are a lot more stable lately. It may have changed.

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Footnotes

1. I’m not using the LineageOS for microG, but the official LineageOS manually patched with tingle and my OTA-survival microG flashable ZIP
2. There’s this book in Spanish —disclaimer: written by a friend of mine— called Sal de la Máquina (Spanish for Escape the Machine) about the aggresive incursion of smartphones in our lives (do you remember Fairphone’s Peace of Mind widget?), which analyzes the consecuences of smartphone overuse and recommends some tricks to avoid being consumed and harvested by the Attention and Surveillance economies, like a permanent Do not disturb mode for notifications (again, one of Fairphone OS’s points), or reviving dumb wrist watches and alarm clocks.

[chrmhoffmann]

Yes, this is a known problem with power-off alarms on lineage (it’s not a fairphone specific problem). It kind of works, but you have to restart the phone to get it into working state again.

Chris

[Roboe]

Oh, so this supports even more my guess that this feature will stabilize soon,

Thank you for dropping by, Chris,

[oli.sax]

Hello !
I tried to demonstrate that feature to friends (setting up the alarm 3 minutes later then shutting down the FP2), but it was unsuccessful (the phone didn’t wake up at all).
Do we have to activate some option somewhere? Is it working on official LOS 15.1 (the version I have)?

Best regards,
Olivier

[Roboe]

AFAIK, it doesn’t work on 15.1 (yet?)