FakeStandby

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Please read the disclaimer.

Where is the problem?

Most smartphones have long-living batteries these days, but who doesn’t want to keep their phone alive for just one hour more? While using an app, you maybe not necessarily need you display. So, why don’t turn it off? Up to 20% of your battery power is consumed by the display.

Here is the solution!

FakeStandby is an Android app for turning the screen off while keeping apps running. This includes foreground jobs, which means you can keep

all with your screen turned off.

Some more use cases

A user has reported to use the app to keep the GPS tracking in a buggy navigation app running, whlie the phone is in the pocket. Another user wrote me he uses it while driving to have a video call in only one direction where the calling person could see them, but the driver is not distracted.

How does it work?

The app is basically launching an overlay over the app currently running. Therefore it is using Android’s accessibility services. All it’s rendering on the overlay is a black canvas, effectively turning your pixels off. The apps you’re using won’t notice this, because technically your phone is turned on.

Disclaimer

The application is programmed in a very “technical” fashion. It may or may not work on your current phone model and with your particular version of Android. There is a chance that you might lock yourself out of your own phone! Be careful! If you face any issues, you could write me or open an issue on GitHub. However, I can not guarantee to have a proper solution. I am testing the app on my personal device and as I am a single person developing this application I cannot afford all device models with every version of Android out there.

Some smartphones have LCDs with background lighting, that only turns off, when you really press the power button to lock your phone. The concept works better for OLED or AMOLED displays, where “turning pixels black” is identical to “turning pixels off”. You should not except huge power saving effects on any device especially on devices with LCD display.

Contribute

Feel free to contribute to the FakeStandby project! Make sure to look at the Code Of Conduct and the Contributing Information.

Licensing

FakeStandby is an android app that turns off your screen while keeping apps running. Copyright (C) 2023 Jonas Bernard

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You can read the whole license here

About me

I’m a student from Germany working on this project in my spare time. Read about me here.