Due to a change introduced for Android 4.2 about two months ago, Android is getting annoying for me to the point of “I do not want to use this any longer”. The change I am talking about introduced a new “feature” for all devices sporting 4.2 . The framework was changed in order to make all notifications, which have a notification-sound attached to them, vibrate when the phone is put in vibration-mode. This renders application-specific settings useless since the OS is favoring itself above anything else. For a little example: You can define in the GMail-Application if there should be a vibration when a new message arrives. Now, assuming you set this up to say that there shouldn’t be vibrations on new mails. Ever. But you also setup a notification sound which makes GMail playback the sound as soon as a mail arrives and the phone is neither in silent- nor in vibrate-mode. Now, in 4.1 and before, you’d get no notification (besides the usual notification in the notification-drawer) when your phone is either in silent- or vibrate-mode (that is the behavior I came to expect). But now in 4.2 you’ll get a vibrating phone when your phone is in vibrate-mode, besides the fact that you disabled the vibrations in the app’s settings. This is highly annoying as every single notification you’ll get with a sound attached to it, will vibrate the phone when in vibrate-mode. This has been mentioned on numerous Google-Code-Issues and Google hasn’t reacted to anything as of yet.

Why does this annoy me so much?
Well, I have a few apps which should inform me about new notifications when they arrive with a sound. But a lot of those apps aren’t supposed to do a darn thing, when I put my phone in vibrate-mode. I only want to be notified with a vibration about specific notifications (i.e. SMS/MMS) or when the phone actually rings. I always took it as a setting between the silent- and the full-sound-modes. With the new “feature” this has become utterly useless. My phone vibrates all the time when put in vibrate-mode (mails, NotifyMyAndroid, …) due to the amount of notifications I get and when in silent, I miss important notifications (for example: My phone is ringing!). The proposed workaround involves setting all those pesky apps to be silent in the first place (i.e. they do not playback a notifications sound when sound is on either) and then move on. Another workaround would be using an application like lightflow (which I already purchased). But those don’t do it for me (mainly because it annoys me that I have to use workarounds in the first place).

I’m currently in the process of setting up my build-env. to build CyanogenMod (my choosen ROM) for my Galaxy Nexus (GSM) myself. In this process I’ll be altering the source back to the point before the change happened, in order to remove this stupidity from the code. I’ll also will dish out only a services.jar for you poor souls who are unable to rectify this issue on their own.  Stay tuned and expect something on the weekend.

due to the fact that I am unable to compile working versions of XBMC for Android right now and the fact that the XBMC-Team has decided to put up their own build-system for android-nightlies (downloads over here: http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/android/ ), I am discontinuing my service and hence forth will not provide any nightlies any longer – this is also true for the AML-Version (which I wasn’t able to use anyhow ).

This blog will continue to feature my guides for XBMC, with the next update being scheduled for XBMC’s final Frodo-Release.

I cleaned out the posting in this blog (the Autoposts to be specific) and rebuilt the build-system. it is working now and you will receive updated APK’s every night again.

Long story short:
Job life is killing my free time so no progress on FreakOut has been made.

We’ll see how much content I can come up with