Watch AOD behaving differently in debug/developer mode connected to a PC

Hi,

So I’m experiencing something strange. When developing and testing my watch faces on the device I put them in developer mode and have them connected to my pc. Nothing strange… everything works as expected, I manage to clear out all the bugs etc… or so I thought.

I started getting some reports from a couple of customers that are experiencing strange behavior in AOD mode. Strange I thought, I tested it on my device pretty thoroughly before submitting it. But I took the information and tried to replicate the issue my customer were having… No success, everything worked fine on my end… no error messages, nothing strange that I noticed.

But then I tested to switch all the developer modes off. Disconnect it from my PC… and wear the watch face as a regular user.

And there it is! I experienced the same issue that was reported. The issue is that, time for some reason does not update when in ambient mode with all the developer tools turned off. With the debugger / developer mode on and connected to PC, it all works fine.

This is very problematic as I’m having a very hard time debugging the issues if it behaves differently with the dev tools turned off. One is that bugs get missed since I expect the tools provided to work as expected with the difference being getting information about the device running the software for a developer. And two, without debug/developer tools working properly, how do I hunt the bugs to eliminate them?

So I’m thinking, either I’m doing something wrong in my code, or there’s a bug in the developer tools provided.

I tried several times to work this out through the Samsung developer support page… But I get ghosted every time. I’m sure the team are super busy (understandable with the announcements made recently). But after almost 6 months, maybe there’s a better way to figure this out.

So I ask the question here to see if other developers have experienced the same issues? Is there anything I’m missing about the dev/debug mode? Are there other things that differs dev mode, debug mode/connected to PC vs regular mode?

Also, the device I’m developing on is a Gear S3 and I’m using the web stack.

Sincerely,
Mike

Develop Options basically does one thing, it enables the developer to by-pass AOD setting Try changing the OPR to less than 10% and see if it works correctly then. When your OPR is even close to max it can cause issues on the actual watch.

Ron
Samsung Developer Relations

Develop Options basically does one thing, it enables the developer to by-pass AOD setting Try changing the OPR to less than 10% and see if it works correctly then. When your OPR is even close to max it can cause issues on the actual watch.

Thanks for the reply Ron! Appreciate it! I tried with lowering the OPR to around 6.90%, unfortunately the problem is still there I’m afraid. The time wont re-render in regular mode, but with the developer tools turned on and connected to PC, it works great… strange.

I’ll try to see if I can find the time to record it. Easier to show what I’m experiencing…