G+_Richard Tan Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Lollipop breaks turning mobile data off programmatically, help needed to star the issue https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=130608 Hi all about android fans. I am not sure if anyone else is facing this issue since lollipop first came out, but it is impacting me, especially on parents devices. The problem is that Google has tightened up security and made a private API private. This API allowed an app to programmatically turn mobile data on or off. I have been using this since Froyo and how it was achieved was to use this undocumented API. Now apps which used this API are no longer able to. Now tightening security for this is all well and good, but they have to provide a public API for this. They have one for Wifi and Bluetooth to programmatically turn it off and on so I don't see why they don't have one for mobile data. To help reintroduce this API, someone has set up an android issues at the below link. It will help if you could star it so that the Google developers can add the API into the SDK. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=130608 (Anyway, you can stop reading if you want to the below is a use case for it) This is the problem with my situation. My parents are using a Nexus 4 with lollipop. In Kitkat and previous version, I had a massive widget on the home screen that that will click on to enable mobile data. Also at 11PM every night I had a scheduler to turn it off, because the phone didn't need mobile data when my parents are asleep. Now in lollipop, even though the mobile data is accessed through the notification shade, it requires two pull downs (or a two finger swipe), find the icon with the mobile network, click on that, and then enable data (how many steps is that???) The problem is parents are not the most tech savvy and they get confused over data. They usually click on Wifi when out and about and connect to public wifi (WHICH IS A BIG NO NO IF YOU DO NOT HAVE VPN). So trying to teach this is hard... also when they don't need it, then at night (they switch off all electrical equipment including wifi) the phone automatically connects to data and the phone just eats the data. This phone is on pay as you go (or post pay) so they end up topping up a lot more often for data they don't care about. So thats my use case and I don't want to root the phone just to have this enable and it should be baked into the API. If WIFI is manageable, why can't mobile data be? https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=130608 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Johan Appelgren Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Probably not enough. But to reduce background data usage you can turn on the Restrict background data feature from the overflow menu in Data usage. Of course you loose things like push notifications but if they have very limited data plans perhaps that is a good thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Richard Tan Posted March 23, 2015 Author Share Posted March 23, 2015 Not what is needed but yes I am aware of that especially with Google music always doing something weird on data :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Brian E. Young Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Yeah this is not really a great thing crippling a lot of the settings I use to both save battery and data. I'm on a limited data plan from tmobile and part of that decision was the ease of just turning data off Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_David L Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 Starred. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Giovanni Trenta Posted August 12, 2015 Share Posted August 12, 2015 Hi guys was then found a way to solve this problem on lollipop? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Richard Tan Posted August 12, 2015 Author Share Posted August 12, 2015 Root. But google has acknowledge it in the M developer preview issue tracker. If you go to their site it is 1 of the highest starred rank, so u should be able to spot it and star it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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