Prevent Android chrome from going idle / auto-locking / sleeping phone?

Question

I need to do on the website some feature to disabled idle/sleep phone. Does anyone try make this on phone with android ? is it in any way possible?

Solution 1

We strongly don't encourage developers to do this at all. However it is possible. You can simply have a video playing on the page and the device won't go to sleep. This means you could have single frame video set to auto-loop and play (requires a user interaction)

Richard Tibbett has created NoSleep.js to simplify the process for developers.

Solution 2

JavaScript in Chrome on Android (7.0) indeed shuts down after 5 min in sleep mode. Aaargh!

To prevent that, we need e.g. an audio object:

<audio id="dummyAudio">
   <source src="silent.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
   <source src="silent.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>

and play it at regular intervals:

function playDummyAudio() { dummyAudio.play(); }    
$(function() {
   var dummyAudio = document.querySelector('#dummyAudio');
   window.setInterval(playDummyAudio, 60 * 1000);
}

Note that the Audio object has to be "unlocked" in a user gesture callback. This can be accomplished e.g. by having a grey CSS overlay with a big fat dummy "Start" button, whose onClick() callback only hides the overlay and calls dummyAudio.load().

Solution 3

There is an experimental implementation of Wake Lock API (http://www.w3.org/TR/wake-lock/) in Chromium starting I believe from version 48.0.2551.0. Though this only works when the experimental features are enabled in the browser e.g. via --enable-experimental-web-platform-features command line switch, so this is not yet useful for the general audience. In the meantime I think it is possible to use the video playback trick as suggested by Kinlan.

Comments

[Šime Vidas]

There are valid use cases. You cannot just not provide an API and then discourage devs from using hacks :-P

[AdamM]

It will be intranet application so no one hurts ;) Thanks

[Per Lindberg]

Does not seem to be implemented at this time.

[Bob Stein]

Use case: automated tests take minutes to run, and sleep suspends the tests. So I put a "video" on the test page, and pause it when the tests are done.