If Google Play Services aren’t on there, the Recording API will not count steps in the background.
That makes a lot of sense.
Probably easiest solution is to let WalkScape to run in the background, when it’s freezed the battery consumption should be basically nothing.
It’s allowed to run in the background, but I have now disabled battery optimisation and will see if that helps.
schamppu@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Yeah - battery optimization has tendency to kill apps, even if they’re not consuming resources. If you’re experiencing battery drain from doing this (or if it works fine), I’d appreciate if you send me your findings to our contact email address ❤️
Dave@lemmy.nz 3 days ago
It doesn’t seem to be helping. If I ever work out a more reliable way to get steps counted I’ll let you know. I know some pedometer apps don’t need Google Play Services and use a persistant notification to keep it active, but it seems like quite a significant change from what you currently have which wouldn’t be worth spending time on to appease such a small group of users.
schamppu@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Before Google released the Recording API, that’s what we used. But it was a huge time sink - with the amount of Android devices and operating systems, there were a ton of device specific issues which were impossible for me to reproduce without buying the models that had these, and we don’t have budget for such.
Pixel devices tended to have battery consumption issues with it, and Chinede devices with battery optimization were killing it very often etc.
If you find some way, I would love to hear about it. In the future we’ll be adding in smart watch support, which could help you to count the steps if you have one.
Dave@lemmy.nz 3 days ago
Yeah I can imagine trying to do it manually could get pretty tricky. I’ll look forward to the smart watch support (though I don’t own one, I might get one if others report it working well with GrapheneOS).
It seems it’s already set to not be optimized. It doesn’t seem to have access to the physical activity permission, but granting that permission didn’t seem to help. It still doesn’t count steps with the screen off.
No matter, thanks for all the ideas, I’ll just keep watching and see if others find a solution. I’ve subscribed to the Walkscape community so hopefully you’ll be posting updates there 🙂