Action: turn off screen (not lock device)

[Daisy666]

Hi Martin and everyone,

I wonder if action "screen off" can be made available. To be clear, what I want is simply turning off thr screen but not NECESSARILY also lock the device (they are two different things).

I know action "Lock Device" has been suggested to support this type of request before, but there is one major disadvantage: after action "lock device", the phone cannot be turned back on using fingerprint recognition. It prompts "Locked by System Administrator" and asked for PIN or pattern to unlock, which is really inconvenient.

Thanks for reading! Please advise.

[MURTUMA]

Generally it is impossible to actively turn screean off on Android without locking it. This is due to how roms itself works and can't be affected by third party apps. If your device is rooted, it might be possible to create some workaround by disabling lockscreen security but I have not yet found any feasible solution.

[Martin]

On a rooted device, you can try to turn the screen off with Execute Root Command: input keyevent POWER to simulate pressing the power button.

Regards,
Martin

[Daisy666]

Thanks Martin!

[heilong]

On a rooted device, you can try to turn the screen off with Execute Root Command: input keyevent POWER to simulate pressing the power button.

Like they say, everything genius is simple. I've found this approach works quite well in many programs that support macros (e.g. Far file manager for Windows). Doing something by simulating what the user would do is sometimes much simpler than programming scripts using the provided macro API.

[Tom]

The "screen off" action is actually implemented in Nova launcher. It has two options for lock screen action:

1) device administrator (no fingerprint unlock possible)
2) delayed lock (shows black screen for 5s) - fingerprint reader can unlock device.

The second option works well (no need for root) and it would be nice to have "delayed lock" in Automagic!

Regards,
Tom

[Martin]

I'm not sure how the feature works in Nova but you could achieve something similar by setting the screen off timeout temporarily to a very short duration. The action allows to go down to 15s. Alternatively you could use an action Set System Setting with category System, Name screen_off_timeout and a value like 5000 (five seconds in milliseconds).

Regards,
Martin