Saturday, January 31, 2015

Sleep Of Death (SOD) problem in Android



Android, the very famous mobile OS which runs in millions of devices has seen a tremendous growth in recent years. Every 7 out of 10 people I know use smart phone which is powered by android.

Android is so easy to use that people easily adapt to it. With the latest version lollipop, android has seen a huge growth. Companies like Samsung, HTC and many more depend hugely on android for their market growth.

I should say there is not much need for providing a skin over android to sell a device. I am not a great fan of Samsung touchwiz or HTC Sense. Stock android is cool and has the benefit of faster update to latest version.

That being said, let me share few pointers where people get upset with android. Android being a huge project and we see lot of developmental changes, bugs are common and with regular software updates it can be resolved too. I am talking about certain bugs which android didn't provide any fix as such and the people who got affected by it are still furious with Google for ignoring such cases



One such issue is Sleep of Death (SOD). I could see people complaining about it from very early releases of android. With the update to lollipop 5.0.1 the complaints has gone more in numbers.

Despite different issues being raised on this, the giant remains silent. In one case Google even declared the issue to be Obsolete despite of people complaining on it.

So what exactly is Sleep of Death?

When you don't use your mobile for some time period,the mobile goes to sleep. This behaviour is very common and all of us know about it. There is a state called deep sleep which the phone gets into if the phone is let to sleep for some calculated amount of time. This kind of trigger is made to save battery.When the device is in deep sleep, it reduces the system resource usage and saves lot of battery.

So what's wrong in this, it saves me battery. There is nothing wrong if the devices wakes up apparently on any reception of call or message or alarm or any other interrupt which ideally needs waking up. What if the device not waking up on these interrupt. This is what is called to be Sleep of Death.


One needs to press the power button for more than 10 seconds to reboot the mobile. Once rebooted, your mobile will get all the notification which it missed during the long sleep.

Is it a software issue or hardware problem ? I tried to understand what could be the reason for such behaviour but I couldn't end up with a conclusion. I cannot be certain that this is definitely a software bug as 2 similar device running same stock version android is not behaving in the same manner. In one device there is trace of SOD while the other there is no trace.

Some people believe this problem is due to certain apps which are installed from play store. This list includes google chrome. Some other believe, its due to wifi settings. Some believe it is due to auto update feature in google play store.

I have personally faced this problem in my nexus 4 device which is running 5.0.1 version.

After trying out lot of options from various web links, one solution did work on my device. Thanks to the person who shared about the below app and many thanks to the person who wrote this app.

Wake my Android Pro - This is an app which you can download free from play store. It does the work of invisibly waking up your device stopping it from entering into deep sleep. You need to configure the frequency at which the mobile should be woken up. The time period of sleep after which the device gets into deep sleep varies from one device to another. So browse on that and set a value less than the time your device gets into deep sleep.Don't worry, it wont eat up your battery. I have tested using it and it saves my mobile from SOD completely.

I hope google puts an end to this SOD problem with their next release at least. Lets hope 'M' version fixes it.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

5 comments:

  1. Good piece... keep us updated about the useful apps

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  2. Good piece... keep us updated about the useful apps

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    1. Thanks a lot. Sure, I will do that as soon as possible.

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  3. Hi, I cannot find the app from the Play Store, can you give me the direct link to Wake My Android Pro

    Currently I have another app that is constantly keeping the device awake and it is not great and drains the battery

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    1. Hi Richard, I believe the app got removed from play store recently as I was using it for months. Please check if you could get the apk of the app from a trusted site and install manually, again it has its own risk. Meanwhile I will try to check for alternative apps if available. Sorry that I missed your comment

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