Phone switches itself on

/e/OS Devices Fairphone
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Last night, during a concert, my phone switched itself on for an alarm. I had switched it off, to be sure that nothing would interrupt the concert. But I was wrong, my phone now seems to be in control.

Luckily I have a Fairphone 3 and could silence it forgood by ripping out the battery. Is that what I will have to to in the future instead? Take out the battery?

I have never in my life experienced this with any phone. I cannot even begin to fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea. Off means off and phones starting to behave like they know better than me belong in some distant distopian future.

Even if this is a feature that can be switched off, who thought it was a good idea to enable it by default?

Can this feature be switched off?

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And you are sure that you didn’t press the power button in the pocket?

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Don’t be surprised in case you find out your view on this matter might be the outlier if you check back with the internet.

Edit: I just checked, and my Fairphone 3 behaves exactly the same as the Fairphone 4 mentioned in the linked topic.
If powered down, it will power itself up 2 minutes before it can then sound the scheduled alarm (although it just vibrates and doesn’t play the alarm sound, might be a bug).

So, I would count this as expected behaviour.

Keeping the power button pressed for about 15 seconds should force a reboot in any situation.

Smartphones have the Do Not Disturb mode for what you want to achieve, you can enable it at will in the quick settings menu (the one you get by swiping down from the top) or in the Settings for a set period of time or for the time until you disable it again. The only thing left to do for you would be to check in its settings that it also silences alarms for you:

Settings - Notifications - Do Not Disturb - Alarms and other interruptions

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Don’t be surprised in case you find out your view on this matter might be the outlier if you check back with the internet.

Maybe it’s my age, but I’m accustomed to me controlling my stuff instead of my stuff controlling my life and behaving like they know better than me. :slight_smile:

Keeping the power button pressed for about 15 seconds should force a reboot in any situation.

But then it will start up and play the alarm, which is just the event I was frantically trying to avoid. What should I do? Keep rebooting until the alarm time has passed? Also it requires me to be aware of the phone booting up. The short vibration at boot can easily go unnoticed.

Smartphones have the Do Not Disturb mode for what you want to achieve

Not exactly, because I use the Do Not Disturb at night to keep notifications from disturbing my sleep, but I DO want my phone to wake me up in the morning.

It seems the only way to prevent this is indeed to take out the battery. Beyond stupid. (sorry for the bluntness. Whatever “The Internet” thinks, that is the only qualification suitable for this behaviour).

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You could also switch from turning the phone on and off (or removing the battery and putting it in again) to switching active alarms on and off for concerts and the likes.

Any users reading along here using phones with glued-in batteries and switching themselves on for alarms? What do you do?

This behaviour was more complicated to implement in phones than to just leave the phones be and not enable them to wake up for alarms. This was implemented in phones because people wanted to have this behaviour (also visible by them later complaining when it wasn’t there).
You don’t like it, I don’t need it, we’ll survive somehow nonetheless :person_shrugging: .

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You could also switch from turning the phone on and off (or removing the battery and putting it in again) to switching active alarms on and off for concerts and the likes.

I need something that is 100% foolproof. (The fool being me). I don’t want to run the risk of missing something. It must be 1 action that guarantees success. That one action from now on seems to be to remove the battery indeed.

This was implemented in phones because people wanted to have this behaviour

As far as my research goes, an iPhone does not do this. Off = off.

we’ll survive somehow nonetheless

Yes there is always a way.

Thanks for your responses, much appreciated.

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I agree with you. It’s anti feature.
Google lol

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A phone that you turn off should absolutely never ever turn itself on again. There are dozens of reasons why that is a bad idea. Think about battery life, for one.

If I notice I’ve forgotten my charger and want to preserve the battery, I can turn it off and expect it to actually stay turned off. Waking up in the morning realizing it just spent the last x hours on anyway may just end up meaning the battery is empty when I actually need it.

I absolutely agree with OP, a phone turned off should be completely off. Most people don’t ever turn their phones off, so this should very likely not cause a lot of complaints.

Anti-feature, for sure!

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One person’s anti-feature may mean the world to another person …

“Is there a way to make the phone ‘wake up’ from off when an alarm goes off? This would mean the world to me.”

“Why alarm is not working when phone is switched off , in Samsung Galaxy m30s???
Any solution.?”

“Good evening, after the update 1 week ago to NothingOs 2.0.4 I have observed that if you turn off the phone with the alarm clock activated it does not ring, it only gives the missed alarm warning when you turn it on again. And for it to work it must always be on, does anyone have this problem or know how to solve it?”

"Most annoyingly, the phone doesn’t seem to turn itself on when there’s an alarm set."

I could continue.
Now what?

The last example refers to a Fairphone 3 shortly after it was released, interestingly, so on the Fairphone 3 this behaviour actually changed, it seems. I don’t know when or how, I didn’t try it until today.

I guess the only real solution would be to make this a setting the user can switch.
I don’t know whether that’s technically possible (could be in firmware without a way to set it differently), but feature requests go to https://community.e.foundation/c/e-smartphone-operating-system/request-a-feature/82 … or directly to the developers at https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/backlog/-/issues (mind this hint about account creation there).

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You don’t have to prove your point, I believe you when you say people were requesting this feature.

Might it be that a few very vocal people succeeded in forcing this “feature” onto the majority?

And like I said, why don’t iPhones do this?

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Of course this might be.
But you seem to be strangely sure of who the majority is in this case. How would we be counting to know?

We wouldn’t need to discuss majorities if this was switchable by the user.

Not every Android phone does this either.

But looking at iPhones in particular … as I said implementing this needs more work than not implementing it, and Apple is in a position to be always right by definition, remember “You’re holding it wrong”.

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Imo that that is an edge case. I get a feeling that many people suffer for the convenience that maybe, maybe you could, if the situation arises, save your battery AND have your phone wake you up.

At the very least it should be an opt-in feature and not opt-out. Now it’s neither. It’s always on.

I think it was better if that would have been a ‘hibernate’ option in the shutdown/restart menu. Then you have to consciously select it:

Restart-screen
Restart-screen799×1376 52.5 KB

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No, I said “might”, so I’m not sure. I am just posing the possibility.

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For the user experience people that decide on this, I find it EXTREMELY hard to believe that the people requesting a phone to turn on for an alarm are in actual fact not working around some other really big issue that really is bothering them.

The fact is that turning off a phone puts it in deep sleep that may last weeks or months (on proper hardware). This is super relevant in a world where a lot of phones do not have a removable battery anymore.

Breaking this behavior is breaking the usability rule of least surprises. Ask 100 people on the street and you’ll see that the majority will say they do not expect an alarm on a device that has been manually turned off. Naturally phrasing of that question is relevant.

I want to repeat that the action of turning off a phone ever is similarly rare for a large number of users out there. This should not be a surprise, people prefer to put their phone on a charger on the nightstand at night if it has a bad battery life.

None of what I wrote here is a surprise to any UX dev.

So, absolutely I understand that some users ask for a feature like the phone turning on. Even though the vast majority of people
a) never hits that usecase (they don’t turn off their phone)
b) expects the action of turning off a device to, well, turn it off…

Or, in other words, what I’m saying is that a single user can certainly come to the solution of “the phone must turn itself on!” when put in that situation. But that doesn’t mean it is predictable behavior. It doesn’t mean that this same user will actually appreciate it were the situation very different in the future. Like being low on battery. Or leaving their phone in a locker at the front desk while at the movies.

The UX devs need to not just fulfil every user-request, as that will lead to a bad product. Instead features should fit the mental model of users. Let the information “in the world” be a guide to what it should do as opposed to the information “in the head” which may be learned behavior and hard to predict.

The simple fact is, 10 minutes before the alarm the phone is turned off. Ask yourself if that means the alarm should ring. I think anyone honest will say it should not. People that haven’t heard the idea before will not think it makes sense to make a device that is manually turned off do something that requires it to be on.

Therefore the phone should reflect this “mental picture”.

Afterall, consider the idea that a person on your starred list calls you. Does the phone turn on then? Can you explain to a techo-phobe why not but alarms CAN be?

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They could just request it because enough old feature phones already behaved this way and/or this somehow makes sense to them. It’s absolutely not hard to imagine this … It’s an alarm, it’s obviously important, as opposed to a simple alarm clock the phone can even remember to sound the alarm when it’s “off” … Woohoo! Progress! What a time to be alive :wink: !

Can the phone know that an alarm is due in a few minutes time?
Yes, of course it can, the alarm was set on the phone, so if it is capable to start itself, it could do this in time to sound the alarm.

Can the phone know any call is incoming in a few minutes time?
No, obviously not, so even with a possible capability to start itself it couldn’t and wouldn’t do it in time.

Therefore you should put in a feature request.
You talked the talk, now walk the walk :wink: .

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You’re definitey more technical than the normal phone user as is clear by your thinking about “a few minutes earlier” :wink:

I’m not at all sure what it is you are trying to say here.

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You said “techo-phobes”, not “logico-phobes” :wink: .
By using your line of arguing … Give this explanation to 100 people on the street and you’ll see that the majority will say it is sound. (See, I can do this, too, without actually proving it.)

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I’m confused…
Are you trying to be funny?

Just in case you are not… First apologies for not getting the joke and responding seriously.

I stand by the point that a phone that is turned off can not be simply be explained to be able to sound an alarm but not be able to ring when a phone call is incoming.
I mean, I’m technical enough to know there is a vast difference between the two and the second is clearly 1000 times harder to do. But I stand by the point that this difference is not something you can expect to be known by users.

You can explain it, but that is a very different proposition at that point based on the fact that most users don’t actually read such kind of explanations. So you need to start at the point of people’s mental model of a normal device like a phone.

Which brings us back the entire point here: the basic logic of a phone being turned off (not reponsive to touch, doesn’t do its major functions) is univerally accepted to mean it doesn’t do anything until the user turns it on.
Deviating from that basic premise could happen only when you are facing a very techy audience that can ‘get’ it and are willing to learn.

But in modern phones for the normal (non techy) user that e.foundation is aiming at, the idea to wake up a phone automatically is just wrong. A UX bug. A breaking of the mental model that you can honestly go and check yourself in the street. Ask your family members. Do the research if you disagree…

I disagree that it can be solved with yet another checkbox. Any UX person knows that is not a solution, indeed it just moves the problem from the designer to the end-user and thus doesn’t actually solve it.

To AnotherElk, what is your opinion in this matter, straight without jokes. Just what do you personally want your phone to do?

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Not really, but I apologise for playing the devil’s advocate perhaps.
I don’t see this issue here as an issue of right or wrong at all, so I found this line of arguing rather curious.
Anyway …

I really don’t care either way, I don’t use this either way, I don’t need this to be either way, I’ll live with it either way.

I understand wanting the phone to stay off, I also understand wanting the alarm to sound even if it’s off, both lines of thinking are coming from somewhere, and I understand both. This really isn’t hard to do.

What I see is pretty simple:

There are devices behaving in a certain way.
There are devices not behaving in this certain way.

There are users wanting a device to behave the one way.
There are users wanting a device to behave the other way.

No arguing in whatever direction here in this context will make the devices go away which behave the respective other way.
No arguing in whatever direction here in this context will make the users go away who want a device to behave the respective other way.

Implementing or not implementing the behaviour one or the other way obviously is a choice for the powers doing it, because both ways are out there in practice.
So the obvious solution for users (if technically feasible) should be choice, too.
Which you want to deny users by being dogmatic about it, ok, so be it.
But what do you want to do now?

You or me or anybody asking anybody else about it will achieve nothing specific in this matter.
UX persons of anybody’s choice knowing anything will achieve nothing specific in this matter.

We will still have the device at hand in this topic (as well as other devices) behaving in a certain way one side of the argument including you find absolutely bizarre, with the other side finding it absolutely reasonable and desirable.

So, the constructive thing to do from my point of view would be … Put in a feature request to at least have a chance to make something specific happen in this matter … to get this changed to your liking, or to get a choice, or to get a specific explanation why this can not be done, or to get a specific explanation why this will not be done.

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That is your projection on how other people use their phone.

Why should an alarm always be important? I use my phone alarm for simple reminders.

If you’re going to a concert, whatever that alarm was supposed to remind you of, is almost by definition less important.

The only valid thing that would be allowed to disturb the music would be an extreme emergency call from a close relative or friend. But because it is not technically possible, the feature is not there.

This feature suffers very much from the mindset: “We can do it therefor we should do it.”