Is it possible to keep an app awake after lockscreen?

pie

Hi, I am trying to put together a small music player (it should play just some app-embedded music).
My biggest problem is that I have it to keep playing music either when the phone is locked, so that the user can put his phone inside a pocket without worrying about touching the screen (and saving up some battery).
Basically I think I just need to avoid "app-pause" and "app-resume".

I tried searching the forum, but couldn't find anything useful or related to my scenario.
Could someone please share some advice?

thank you very much
P.

ar2rsawseen

@pie currently there is no pure Gideros implementation, but maybe it is possible with some OS specific modifications.
So which OS would you want to support? IOS, Android, both?

pie

Both would be perfect in the future, but at this time I just need this for android
Thank you

ianchia

This is for iOS. I'm just popping it here for future reference for folk searching through the forum with the same query. Apologies - I don't have an Android answer.

In the AppDelegate.m file, just before the end of:

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions

insert:

[UIApplication sharedApplication].idleTimerDisabled = YES; // stop device from sleeping

So the end of that method looks like:

[self.window makeKeyAndVisible];   [UIApplication sharedApplication].idleTimerDisabled = YES; // stop device from sleeping   return YES; }

I do this all the time for the exported Gideros iOS Player during development because it saves me having to touch the screen every few minutes to avoid device sleep, which gets to be !#(*^&%@# annoying. (-;

Note this is different to the use-case as specified in the original question. Under iOS, you can't keep the app "awake" after lock screen. However, you can specify certain services to continue after lock screen (such as music.) For such cases, you need to configure your app for the specific service.

In the case of music, this answer by gabriel_vincent on Stackoverflow works fine:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8926107/continue-audio-playback-when-iphone-is-locked-like-ipod-app

- Ian

ar2rsawseen

@pie you would need to dive into more native development. For android, you would need to create a service, that would get the play list and provide, play, stop, pause and next/prev functions.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16336960/android-playing-music-in-background
And then create Gideros plugin to communicate with this service

@ianchia http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/gideros/Application/setKeepAwake#Application:setKeepAwake :-\"

ianchia

@ar2rsawseen Thanks! Application:setKeepAwake huh. Never noticed that API … (-;

- Ian

pie

Thank you both

@ar2sawseen I'm lucky I don't need to pass play/pause ext/prev controls to the app, the app should just "play in loop some embedded WAVs". I'm sorry if I wrote the question in the wrong way.

What I would need is to keep the application running even after locking the screen (as an example take any music player: if I have it playing something and I lock the screen, it still continues playing).

I already tried application:setKeepAwake, but I'd say it's not doing exactly what I need - unless there is a smarter way to use it than the one I used it ( I just put it at the beginning of main.lua).

In my test on the android gideros player, " application:setKeepAwake(true)" keeps the application running while the phone is unlocked (it "removes" the screen timeout, and the app is actually still running even with no interactions) but it doesn't keep the app "alive in background" if I manually lock the screen.
Didn't tried it in a compiled apk, but I suppose it would behave the same.

I still need to dive into android native development, am I right?

I tried googleing around but I'm not even sure on what to look for... If only I could find something I would give it a try, but I am afraid it would be far out of my comprehension/skills

Thank you!

ar2rsawseen

@pie no matter the purpose, gideros still pauses its own thread in background and you can only do something in services in native platform and post the result back to lua thread, when app is back to foreground