Android lock screen flic horror, even in 2018
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I want to use flic on a bicycle to turn on the screen and show my navigation app on a handlebar mounted phone. I've been trying for hours now and still can not find a way to do that. Not with flic app, not with Tasker, not with anything. Seriously?
Lock screen is set to PIN since disabling security alltogether is not an option. However, the phone is set to Smart Unlock with the flic button as smart unlock device. That part works, the phone is actually always unlocked when it's close to the button. However, the screen is normally OFF.
It seems to be IMPOSSIBLE to have a flic button turn ON the screen, bypass the useless lock screen (the one that only says "phone unlocked with smart unlock") and show an app.
flic simply needs to do the exact same thing as a strong press on the home button (samsung galaxy s8): turn on the display and bypass the ridicolous "unlocked" lock screen, immediately showing the app I am interested in.
What can I do?
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The Android designers don't like third party apps to unlock the phone. They are putting more and more restrictions over time, especially now with the 8 and 9 updates. Last time we got an email from Google Play complaining that we used the Lock/turn off the Screen feature in Android.
Anyway, the only way we could solve this would be to be a HID device (like a keyboard), so we simulate Enter Enter which would unlock the phone unless you have a PIN or similar. But we evaluated that and came to the conclusion that HID works very poorly in Android if we at the same time would like Flic to be an ordinary BLE device usable by the Flic app. (It's like the OS takes over the device connection etc., and it interferes with other apps; for example they might hide the on-screen keyboard). However, HID works good enough on iOS so there we use it for a couple of actions.