Prevent Android chrome from going idle / auto-locking / sleeping phone?

Question

I need to do on the website some feature to disabled idle/sleep phone. Does anyone try make this on phone with android ? is it in any way possible?

Trimetallic

Why do you want to prevent sleep on a website? – Tautology

@LouisCAD Certain web apps are designed to be active while the user is performing an activity, like cooking or exercising. – Creaturely

@LouisCAD when uploading a file it's good to keep the page active. – Einstein

Possible duplicate of Can I prevent phone from sleep on a webpage – Gobert

Answer 1

We strongly don't encourage developers to do this at all. However it is possible. You can simply have a video playing on the page and the device won't go to sleep. This means you could have single frame video set to auto-loop and play (requires a user interaction)

Richard Tibbett has created NoSleep.js to simplify the process for developers.

Subjection

There are valid use cases. You cannot just not provide an API and then discourage devs from using hacks :-P – Creaturely

It will be intranet application so no one hurts ;) Thanks – Trimetallic

Use case: automated tests take minutes to run, and sleep suspends the tests. So I put a "video" on the test page, and pause it when the tests are done. – Factoring

Answer 2

JavaScript in Chrome on Android (7.0) indeed shuts down after 5 min in sleep mode. Aaargh!

To prevent that, we need e.g. an audio object:

<audio id="dummyAudio">
   <source src="silent.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
   <source src="silent.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>

and play it at regular intervals:

function playDummyAudio() { dummyAudio.play(); }    
$(function() {
   var dummyAudio = document.querySelector('#dummyAudio');
   window.setInterval(playDummyAudio, 60 * 1000);
}

Note that the Audio object has to be "unlocked" in a user gesture callback. This can be accomplished e.g. by having a grey CSS overlay with a big fat dummy "Start" button, whose onClick() callback only hides the overlay and calls dummyAudio.load().

Orebro

Answer 3

There is an experimental implementation of Wake Lock API (http://www.w3.org/TR/wake-lock/) in Chromium starting I believe from version 48.0.2551.0. Though this only works when the experimental features are enabled in the browser e.g. via --enable-experimental-web-platform-features command line switch, so this is not yet useful for the general audience. In the meantime I think it is possible to use the video playback trick as suggested by Kinlan.

Denaturalize

Does not seem to be implemented at this time. – Orebro