give user an info that the screen must not be locked while recording

[Danfro]

For the app to work, it either needs to have the screen turned on all the time (no screen locking!) or background suspension needs to be enabled. I can not find any in-app info for the user about this. Only one short line in the README.

There should be a info dialog maybe (first run? or every time when recording?) or some other way to make the user aware of this.

[mymike00]

Yeah, that definitely needs to be added. Also, I'm not sure that background suspension is enough because iirc if there is no foreground app that asks for position the gps service goes to sleep, and activity tracker will be active in background but without receiving new positions...
There was some work from mardy to keep the gps service awake if there is something listening to its events. But that also would keep awaken the listener, which in our case would be perfect but could keep awaken morph too if a website was requesting position, and that is not usually desirable...

[Danfro]

Hmm, not 100% sure if that worked with background suspension. I would need to try that on my xenial device. Since there is no UTTT for focal yet, I don't know how to do that there. But we need to check that before adding info.

But certainly it would be better to get a proper fix for this, although I have no idea how to do that.

[mymike00]

I think you could try to play with gsettings to prevent app background suspension, at least that seems what uttt is doing

[Danfro]

Btw. the commit reference here is wrong because I had a typo in there first. Although I corrected the commit message, this reference here stays for some reason.

[Danfro]

I did not test yet again on focal if prevent suspension is enough. I wasn't outside recently, but already got that set up.

Until UTTT is available for focal, we can prevent background suspension like this:

1. get all apps listed for background suspension with

gsettings get com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids

2. add activity tracker to that list and set it with

gsettings set com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids "['com.ubuntu.music', 'activitytracker.cwayne18']"

Also not sure if a systemd service might help us on focal. I don't know enough about that yet.

[mymike00]

Yeah, I think the service could be a better solution but might not be enough, it would still encounter the same issues I mentioned before, just like the app