889009 - [Clock] When phone is powered down, allow an alarm to trigger phone startup and alarm notification

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Clock, defect)

Description

[sgl4kn]

User Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set the alarm
2. Turn phone off


Actual results:

No alarm on Geeksphone Peak while phone is off.


Expected results:

Alarm should sound (as it does with every Nokia, Apple) and after I turn it off / snooze there should be a message "Do you want to turn the phone on?"

Comment 1

[sgl4kn]

Use case for the alarm: "Tom no longer owns an alarm clock and solely relies on his mobile phone as an alarm clock to wake himself up each day" https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Clock
- Not fulfilled! 


The Alarm API itself (no HW interaction here?): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/Alarm

Web Alarms API: "ScheduledTask API actually does more than setTimeout() because it can actively wake the system from sleeping." http://web-alarms.sysapps.org/ 
- Not fulfilled!

Comment 2

[Gene Lian (I already quit Mozilla)]

This is a new feature. Not sure our product team likes this idea or not.

Comment 3

[sgl4kn]

Guess from Kernel driver site we have everything:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/rtc.txt

Comment 4

[Stephany Wilkes]

Assigning to Casey for systems purposes, though I'm not sure how we could expect anything to work when the phone is literally off.

Comment 5

[Rick Waldron [:rwaldron]]

(In reply to sgl4kn from comment #0)
> User Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> 1. Set the alarm
> 2. Turn phone off
> 
> 
> Actual results:
> 
> No alarm on Geeksphone Peak while phone is off.
> 
> 
> Expected results:
> 
> Alarm should sound (as it does with every Nokia, Apple) and after I turn it
> off / snooze there should be a message "Do you want to turn the phone on?"

As an iPhone user, I've never heard of this feature, so I did a reality check...

STR: 

1. Set an alarm for 2 minutes from now (wait two minutes, alarm sounds, confirm alarm works correctly)
2. Set an alarm for 2 minutes from now
3. Shut off the phone
4. After 3 minutes, no alarm, no prompt to turn on the device
5. Turn on the device

Once the device is back on, the alarm _does_ go off, with an option to snooze.


Confirmed behaviour on:

- iPhone 4s, iOS 6.1.4
- iPhone 5, iOS 6.1.4

Comment 6

[sgl4kn]

OK, good to know (I just got apple from a german "handy finder" (inside-handy.de) where you can filter handys based on that function (guess there data is wrong then for Apple).

However, if you're looking for references:
Symbian: 
My Nokia C7 is lying next to me and it wakes me up reliably even when switched off during the night. Same applies for my business handy Nokia 700. And all my previous Symbian phones were able to do that.

WP8: 
Although I looked up the current state for the new Lumias and Windows Phone and found this on the nokia site:
Nokia Lumia 920 - Does the alarm clock work when my Nokia Lumia phone is switched off?
 - Windows Phone does not support this feature at the moment. Nevertheless you can switch Flight modeon whenever phone is not needed, for example, while you are sleeping.
http://www.nokia.com/us-en/support/product/lumia920/faq/?action=singleTopic&topic=FA138060

Android: 
I haven't tried on these, but I think every Huawei should support it (when I look at some forum threads and the manual itself). For example:
Huawei - Ascend P1
"The alarms will ring even when your phone is powered off." Handbook/Source:
http://download-c.huawei.com/tcpsdownload/downLoadCenter?category=&flay=document&downloadID=NDY5OTE=
But Android seems not to support this in general. One gay at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1942 wrote: "My Huawei Ideos X3 will sound an alarm when the phone is switched off (it boots into flight mode a minute or so before the alarm is due)."

So what should happen technically, of course nothing can be done when the phone is off. But every phone has a clock which doesn't have to be adjusted every time the phone restarts. So this means every phone has a RTC (real-time clock, link that I posted above). These RTCs are mostly powered by buffer condensers. So most modern phones even have alarm RTCs which means they can wake up the device. First thing to be done then: Everytime a new alarm is set within FxOS, it has to write the time of the next occuring alarm in the EEPROM of the RTC (kernel linux driver offers the methods for this, link I posted above). When the phone is off RTC wakes it up then the alarm occurs and starts the boot loader. The boot loader starts FxOS. And here is the second thing that needs to be done: FxOS realizes that a "wake-on-alarm" event occured and plays the alarm sound. Then it should display the message if the phone has to be started completely, or should be shut down again.

I'm not a linux engineer, but this is my basic understanding from reading a lot of whitepapers lately.

Comment 7

[sgl4kn]

Symbian ADD: 
"Does the alarm clock work when my Nokia phone is switched off? - Nokia FAQ"
- Yes, your phone alarms on the specified time. Note: Applies for most of Nokia Symbian and Series 40 phones.
http://www.nokia.com/ie-en/support/troubleshooting/?action=singleFAQ&caseid=FA102041_en_US

Comment 8

[Casey Yee]

sgl4kn, thanks for the groundwork on this one!

I agree that this would be a nice feature if we can make it possible.   I'm pretty sure all my old feature phones did wake up and sounded the alarm if they were inadvertently turned off and I found this to be useful.

Comment 9

[[e-mail], [e-mail]]

(In reply to Rick Waldron from comment #5)
> (In reply to sgl4kn from comment #0)
> > User Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15
> > 
> > Steps to reproduce:
> > 
> > 1. Set the alarm
> > 2. Turn phone off
> > 
> > 
> > Actual results:
> > 
> > No alarm on Geeksphone Peak while phone is off.
> > 
> > 
> > Expected results:
> > 
> > Alarm should sound (as it does with every Nokia, Apple) and after I turn it
> > off / snooze there should be a message "Do you want to turn the phone on?"
> 
> As an iPhone user, I've never heard of this feature, so I did a reality
> check...
> 
> STR: 
> 
> 1. Set an alarm for 2 minutes from now (wait two minutes, alarm sounds,
> confirm alarm works correctly)
> 2. Set an alarm for 2 minutes from now
> 3. Shut off the phone
> 4. After 3 minutes, no alarm, no prompt to turn on the device
> 5. Turn on the device
> 
> Once the device is back on, the alarm _does_ go off, with an option to
> snooze.
> 
> 
> Confirmed behaviour on:
> 
> - iPhone 4s, iOS 6.1.4
> - iPhone 5, iOS 6.1.4

The behavior is same with Firefox OS phone now. We support pending alarm.

Comment 10

[sgl4kn]

>The behavior is same with Firefox OS phone now. We support pending alarm.
So it rings even if no PIN is entered? This means that we would "only" have to boot 1min prior the alarm. Is Huawei partner of FxOS? Maybe they can help out and show how they're doing it with their Android phones?

Comment 11

[sgl4kn]

Guess there is nothing new, so just as an info another model which supports offline alarms (got it as a new business mobile):
- Alcatel One Touch Idol (6030x)

Comment 12

[[e-mail], [e-mail]]

The feasibility is needed to research by platform devs if some devices are supporting offline alarms.

Comment 14

[Marcus Cavanaugh [:mcav]]

Renamed this bug to describe the feature being requested. In summary:

- Apparently some low-end phones have hardware triggers to allow
  alarms to fire even when the phone is literally powered off.
  Alarms would cause the phone to boot up.

- Neither Android nor iOS do this.

Concerns:

- This would require low-level support, which doesn't seem to exist
  currently and would require APIs from hardware vendors.

- If I, as a user, powered down the phone expecting to save battery,
  I would be surprised to find the phone waking up. So while it may
  be advantageous for some cases, it goes against the grain of building
  modern phones that are designed to survive on standby mode for days
  or weeks at a time.

Comment 16

[Christian]

I have bought a ZTE Open C two weeks ago, and I miss this feature, too. As this is my first smart phone and my last devices haven been older mobile phones, I expected the phone to turn on by itself on the time the alarm should start. This is what I was used to.

I have exactly the use case as sgl4kn has mentioned in his first comment.

I turn the device off for the night to save battery.

Comment 17

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on