Develop Bugs

LED Notification flash - Not working?

I haven't fully tested this issue yet mainly because I've only had the phone for a few days... I wanted to check if anyone else had this problem.
Under Settings -> Sound & Display -> Notification Flash
I have all the options ticked.
In theory, whenever I have a missed call or a SMS or email etc, I should be able to tell that I need to check my phone be a little blinking light in the top right corner off the screen. I just came back to my phone and this LED wasn't blinking but when I turned on the phone, there was a missed call and a SMS.
Other times, it seemed to work fine.
Anyone else noticed this problem?

it only flashes for 5 mins and then stops. There is no way to change this without additional apps.
Sent from my HTC Desire using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk

Oh... How disappointing. Pretty useless imo. Thanks for the info. I wonder if they will fix it. My previous phone, Touch Diamond, had something similar but it never stopped flashing until you looked at your missed calls.

Now that explains things. I tend to look for the led after I've not used the phone for a while. In my pocket or elsewhere. Quite a few times I've seen no flashing but have a notification in the top left. I thought it was another one of those little 'features' we keep finding.

Yeh i discovered this awhile back and it's annoying as hell, i just use a app called Missed Reminder which can be configured to allowed it to keep flashing indefinitely

I was just going to make a post about this. I thought the LED notification wasn't working at all on my Desire, since I've never seen it, but perhaps it had just stopped before I had the chance to catch it, then

ardsar said:
it only flashes for 5 mins and then stops. There is no way to change this without additional apps.
Sent from my HTC Desire using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
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What apps are you referring to? It would be nice to be able to have the LED flash longer.

I'm guessing this is to save battery time, I don't know how much power a small LED uses but it surely can't help with the already abysmal battery life

I first thought the LED was located behind the optical trackpad, because the trackball on my Hero could light up. I think the LED-notification is pretty dumb since it's almost invisible when it lights up. The lighting trackball was much much better

This is a known issue. I thought that did not happen in Android, but I guess I was wrong.
If the phone work in Windows Mobile, there are a registry key to let assign values to the options, so they are usable.
Here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=4846399#post4846399
In Android, I have no clue... maybe my info help in any way.
PMoto

It would be nice to be able to change the flash time from the default 5 minutes, or atleast an option for no time limit.
I know it's to help save battery life, but I'm willing to say that the light flashing will use less battery then the back light coming on everytime I'm away from my phone for more then 5 minutes, from me checking to see if I have new messages, email, or missed phone calls.

Same issue with my recently purchased A40.
No blinking at all despite screen flash notification selected.
Hope someone can help

No notification LED on my Incredible

I recently got a used Incredible. Everything seemed good on it, except the optical trackpad wasn't working. It'd work for button presses, but not navigation. After acquiring a screwdriver set ($6.15 total at Lowe's) that had T6, and watching a couple of videos on the Incredible teardown, I opened it up, re-seated the ribbon cable for the optical trackpad (it was slightly askew on one side), and it works perfectly now.
Well, close to perfectly. The notification LED doesn't seem to do anything at all. Never, not when charging, not when I have notifications, period.
I've not been able to find anything online specifically dealing with the notification LED. Is this something that might also just have a loose or improperly replaced cable, and I could conceivably fix easily? Or is it soldered to the mainboard, and if it's dead, it's dead?

LED notification also depends on the ROM.
Sent from my ADR6300 using XDA Premium App

Theres an application called "Light Flow" that lets you play with the LED settings and also as stated above there could be a software issue.
Also by some random chance the previous owner may have blacked it out. I've been annoyed with some leds before so I've cracked things open and sharpied them to death.

/offtopic a bit
LED notification is pretty useless anyway. It has never once let me know anything that I didn't know before. 1button to power screen on to see exactly if you have a missed call/text/low battery/if your phone is charging/ etc.

POQbum said:
LED notification is pretty useless anyway. It has never once let me know anything that I didn't know before. 1button to power screen on to see exactly if you have a missed call/text/low battery/if your phone is charging/ etc.
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I don't miss it too much, I just would prefer for my phone to be -fully- functional.
When I had my Eris previously to this, I did find it handy to be able to glance at the phone from across the room and see if it was blinking. That's really my only "useful" loss.

smtom said:
LED notification also depends on the ROM.
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Well, it's not doing anything on Any ROM. Stock, any Sense based ones, AOSP ones, nor even when charging.
bukithd - thanks, I'll check out Light Flow.

How many LED notification colors are there when using Light Flow?

For those with the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, how many different color notifications are there for the LED when you use Light Flow?

17 colours to choose from on mine, it seems.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

darrendm said:
17 colours to choose from on mine, it seems.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
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But will the phone display all those 17 or only say 4?

The Nexus has a RGB LED so any of the 17 colors can be mixed without a problem.
Why don't you try it by yourself? Lazy?
Despite that I have 19 colors to choose from on my GSM Nexus with Light Flow (paid).

Just a quick warning from my experience with Light Flow lite.
I installed the free version and it worked fine - I think I used 10 different colors and most of the time the worked well (sometimes the light would stay on when the notification was cleared).
However, I was having battery life issues so I uninstalled the application.
This actually GREATLY improved my battery life - but now my led is broken. It will only flash white, and it doesn't work for all events that it did before I used LFL. I've done a factory reset and a battery pull and the led will not go back to green.
I've emailed the developer and hope I'll get some help. It's a little hard for me to understand how this could happen and I hope I can fix it.
Just a word of caution to anyone considering using this app.

McDeadagain said:
Just a quick warning from my experience with Light Flow lite.
This actually GREATLY improved my battery life - but now my led is broken. It will only flash white, and it doesn't work for all events that it did before I used LFL. I've done a factory reset and a battery pull and the led will not go back to green.
I've emailed the developer and hope I'll get some help. It's a little hard for me to understand how this could happen and I hope I can fix it.
Just a word of caution to anyone considering using this app.
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I don't think mine has ever flashed green? The stock notification for mail + sms is white, and tweetdeck is yellow... not seen anything else?
I too uninstalled Liteflow, because I found it frequently flashed forever until I rebooted when there were no notifications.

On the Nexus one, CM7 had a slider control for colors. You could create hundreds of different shades.
I think the Galaxy Nexus is the same. At this point we're only limited by software. RootzBoat rom had a LED color control built right into the general settings menu, but only had a few color selections. I used blue and I liked it alot. I don't think it allowed you to change it PER APP, but just the general color for all. Still cool to mess with again.
3rd party programs require to be run in the background as an app or service, but require constant monitoring. Kernel level control is best, but we'll have to wait for CM9 for that.

jmbillings said:
I don't think mine has ever flashed green? The stock notification for mail + sms is white, and tweetdeck is yellow... not seen anything else?
I too uninstalled Liteflow, because I found it frequently flashed forever until I rebooted when there were no notifications.
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Ok then - maybe I've lost my mind! I thought I remembered it being green originally but it's entirely possible you're correct. Would make much more sense than to think that an app could 'break' the led functionality.

+1 for jmbillings.
Natively the LED is only flashing only whitish and as to be readable in a couple of threads not even that is working properly at all times.
Never had any issue with Light Flow except a not stopping notification ones a week. Bought it for Whatsapp and I'm still happy. No battery drain at all at no time.

you guys must be getting dozens of notifications in a day.
i've never even seen lightflow pop up under my battery statistics.

I use light flow on my Nexus and it works great!

Same here lightflow works great on my Nexus. And every single color I tried works. If some people are having trouble with the light still flashing even after swiping the notification away, try going into the app itself. It apparently will keep flashing until I actually check the notification out in the app.

Light flow didn't work for me, it would either flash constantly in test mode or do nothing. My LED does flash green for chompSMS but white for everything else.

light flow works 100% for me. Notifications always work and no notification his become 'stuck' when I clear it...
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

DanVanDamn said:
+1 for jmbillings.
Natively the LED is only flashing only whitish and as to be readable in a couple of threads not even that is working properly at all times.
Never had any issue with Light Flow except a not stopping notification ones a week. Bought it for Whatsapp and I'm still happy. No battery drain at all at no time.
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Well maybe it's a native problem that I'm having. It will not notify me now of a missed call or an email. The only time I'm seeing the led blink is when I get a text message.
The developer actually took the time to reply to me and make some recommendations to improve battery life.
I'll give it another try, still having intermittent battery issues but may be more related to location polling than this app.
Thanks again to the folks here who take the time to help out.
---------- Post added at 05:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:45 PM ----------
neok44 said:
you guys must be getting dozens of notifications in a day.
i've never even seen lightflow pop up under my battery statistics.
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Click to collapse
Yes, I do.
I don't see it under the native battery stats - it did show up fairly high on the list when I was using battery monitor widget.
Honestly, trying to figure out my battery issues has me suspicious of every app I install...

Works perfectly on my Verizon Nexus as well. The only hiccup is Handcent. If I dismiss the popup window on Handcent, the LED will continue to flash, until I actually go into Handcent and view the message,

I was using it to alert me if bluetooth was on, and that notification would tend to persist after I had turned bluetooth off.

For those having issues clearing the LED notifications, keep in mind just clearing the notification from the drop down won't turn off the LED. It will stay on until the notification is further acknowledged (i.e. the SMS message is 'read' under messages...or email etc).
Also, something I've found helpful is the lightflow debugger widget that comes installed with the app. From there you can clear all notifications as well as see what the last notification was

Technically the phone works well with all 17 colors - but as a male i must say that there are only approx. 8 colors existing in the world...

I think they need to combine the app (LightFlow) with the color selector from AOKP ROM. Its basically the MS Windows/Photoshop color chooser we're all used to: a circle with a slider to the right. The combination of those allows you to choose ANY color in the spectrum. And the LED will display it. (Blood red is my favorite....not as "light up your room" as the default cyan/white)
I did catch the LED lighting up yellow when I had a text that didnt get delivered....not sure if thats the SMS app Im using (GoSMS) or the kernel/ROM but something made it flash different color at different frequency.
Id love LightFlow just for all the apps it responds to....especially Words with Friends.

[SOLVED] LED issues with SMS Popup

I'm trying to get this AT&T SGS3 set up for my wife (mostly stock firmware), and she wants something that has both repeating SMS notifications and the ability to have different notification tones for different people sending her messages. IT appears that "SMS Popup" supports this (but still allows her to use the default SMS app for normal reading and composing.)
However, I'm finding that the LED doesn't seem to work well with the application: No matter what "blink rate" I set, the LED will stay steady on. Even a custom blink rate of "1000ms on, 5000ms off" results in a steady, always on LED. As well, it seems impossible to get the LED color configured to something reasonable. For example, I configure magenta, and I get yellow. I configure yellow and I get white. I configure red and I get a bright cyan.
(When I configure SMS popup on the international SGS3 (i9300), the LED options work fine.)
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Gary

Not a solution, but it's not just you. Essentially, Samsung buggered up the implementation of the LED on the North American S3 and 3rd party devs are having a heck of a time working around it.

TheFiveDots said:
Not a solution, but it's not just you. Essentially, Samsung buggered up the implementation of the LED on the North American S3 and 3rd party devs are having a heck of a time working around it.
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Has anyone managed to work around it yet? The source for SMS popup is GPL'd, so it'd be mostly trivial for me to patch in a fix (assuming a fix was known.)
If not, I guess I'll have to spend some time this weekend examining the LED support in the kernel and trying to reverse engineer whatever samsung did.

Fyi , the AT&T OTA that came out today changes the notification light to blink instead of being solid-on.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

I'm confused... the stock firmware (from before this update) would blink on "stock" notifications (such as email, SMS, etc), and stay steady on the charging LED.
The issue, it seems, is with 3rd party apps that try to use the LED (such as SMS Popup) - in that case, the LED would get stuck ON.
Are you saying that this update resolves the stock on for 3rd party apps?
Gary

Use Liteflow. It will do everything you mention and it works correctly with the LED.

rkennison said:
Use Liteflow. It will do everything you mention and it works correctly with the LED.
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Click to collapse
I'd prefer to avoid lightflow (and other system-wide notification handlers)... I've seen too many issues with it related to wakelocks.
(I know some people disagree with me about lightflow. That's nice and we are entitled to disagree on that, but please don't drag this thread into a discussion on the merits of lightflow, if it does or doesn't have issues, etc.)
Take care
Gary

garyd9 said:
Are you saying that this update resolves the stock on for 3rd party apps?
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To answer my own question, the OTA (LH9) does seem to resolve any LED issues from 3rd party apps... both blinking issues AND color issues.

If you are willing to dump the stock sms ap. It seems that after this latest firmware update, in Handcent sms the colors now work correctly. Also I am able to get some different blink rates. I have not tried many though.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2

Question horizon light op9 pro

I have tried everything in terms of manipulating the settings, but I cannot get horizon light to work at all, am I the only one with this issue, and does anyone know what needs to be done in order for it to function that isn't obvious?

thirtythr33 said:
I have tried everything in terms of manipulating the settings, but I cannot get horizon light to work at all, am I the only one with this issue, and does anyone know what needs to be done in order for it to function that isn't obvious?
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No issues here. The colored bars show up when the screen is off and a notification comes in. I do have always on display, well, always on....not sure if that matters or not.

Mine doesn't seem to work either on the NA phone. And I can't even tell, are they supposed to light up just once or do they act more like the old notification LEDs?

Icculus760 said:
No issues here. The colored bars show up when the screen is off and a notification comes in. I do have always on display, well, always on....not sure if that matters or not.
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yeah I tried that but to no avail, is it lighting up with any app or only certain ones? for example, I use fairemail for email and threema/signal for messaging, and it does not light up for any. moreover, it doesn't light up for anything at all, very frustrating.

I've noticed it for notifications from the stock messaging app and Gmail, but haven't seen anything else trigger it yet.

It's not that bright and only does it once so if you blink you will miss it!
I tested it with a calendar notification, not sure what else it works on. Don't remember seeing it for WhatsApp
Eta: it does work on most things, just miss it unless you are looking for it.

indesisiv said:
It's not that bright and only does it once so if you blink you will miss it!
I tested it with a calendar notification, not sure what else it works on. Don't remember seeing it for WhatsApp
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Only does it once, you're right. Basically pointless lol.

NSD said:
Only does it once, you're right. Basically pointless lol.
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Im not entirely sure how well this works, but I have messed around with this app previous. I used an app on the playstore called AOA by newGen Mobile, its not quite an ambient display but it is an Always on Display app that enables you to customize your horizon lights as you see fit(color, duration, pattern and such). There is a free version of it if you want to at least try it out.

Mine works fine, but i'm on Color OS c36.
Too bad that is only 3 colors : blue, red, gold.