Flashlight for notifications

[Mikchr]

Dear friends and For users
Does any of you know if it is possible to activate the flashlight in stead of led notification. It would also be great if it could flash to announce incoming calls. Is it possible and how do I do it
Best regards, a very happy for owner.

[anon9989719]

Yes I’m sure there was a post refering to that, will update with a link if i can find it

[adrienneb]

Perhaps this one?

@DeepSea

There is an app that takes advantage of the camera flash and turns it into a notification flash:

Flash Alert - Call and Message | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

[Ah 20 characters - apparently quote doesn’t count]

[UPPERCASE]

There are indeed apps that can do this. Fairphone support also told me to install such an app if I wanted a notification LED. I personally don’t see the logic of FP to give this advice. The camera flashlight is very bright and is on the back of the phone. So you won’t see it, unless you have your phone face down, which doesn’t allow you to read notifications from the screen. Also the camera flashlight should keep flashing, if you want persitent notifications. Which is not battery efficient, or nice to your eyes and that of others.

My suggestion would be to ask FP to enable the notification LED which is present on the phone, but FP decided to not use it for some reason. If many people request this, I’m sure they will consider enabling it.

More info:

No notification LED and no replaceable microphone in FP4

A few days ago, out of boredom, I read the FP4 Repair price list which actually mentions an LED as part of the core module: PCBA: Motherboard and daughterboard housing SoC Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G (SM7225), SIM card slot, SD card slot, microphones 1, 2 and 3, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, LED, Fingerprint sensor, volume buttons, power button, midframe. Thus, I reached out to fairphone support and asked them wheter this mention is true or false. And actually, it’s true. the core …

[zetrick]

I found another option for me (would not like to call it a workaround):

I use the app “Automate”. There you can create automation flows which can access a huge set of phone functions.
My flow is running in the background and does the following: It checks every 10 minutes if there is a notification active, then compares the sending app (“package”) with a custom list of apps I want to see notifications from and, if the app is on the list, switches on the display for 5 seconds. The comparison is because I do not want to get notified e.g. for calendar appointments staying on the screen the whole day. But for messengers etc. this is an appropriate solution.

Pro: You get some kind of regular visual feedback that there is a pending notification
Con: It consumes a bit more battery for the flow to run in the background and the device to wake up. But I did not mention any real faster drain. And, of course, it is not an LED

If someone is interested, I am happy to share the flow (can be exported/imported as xml file).

[Razem]

Yeah, Automate is a great tool. I use a similar strategy, except my goal was to mimic persistent notifications on my Amazfit Neo. Normally when it receives a notification, it shows a little blinking icon, but it disappears after about 5 seconds. So what my flow does it that whenever I get a notification and it passes through my package filter (similar to yours), it gets repeated every 6 seconds until I unlock the phone. This effectively triggers Zepp to send a BLE packet to my watch and display a new notification. And although it may sound rather extreme, it consumes only like 2% of battery per day (with battery optimizations disabled). So you really don’t have to worry.