I use the Android app AlarmClock to turn off an ‘occupants asleep’ item to control various items, and recently (not sure when it started) a ‘phantom alarm’ has done this at 4am. There is no alarm set for 4am on my phone (and it still appears when I turn all alarms off).
In the app’s log, it is reported as “sent by null” (see log below), What can I do to investigate and fix this?
11-13 20:34:12.265 22748 22748 D BackgroundTasksManager: Got value ‘ValueWithInfo(value=1763092800000, mappedValue=null, type=Timestamp, debugInfo=Got alarm time update to 04:00 2025-11-14 which was sent by null)’ for alarmClock
There’s an app on your device that sets an “alarm”. It seems that the app is doing this to get woken up and do some background work, I guess. The openHAB app has a list of apps that show this behavior and thus ignores alarms by these apps. But in this case the app isn’t known (`sent by null`). Not sure what can be done here.
Thanks, is there nothing l can do at the Android level to find the misbehaving app? It certainly doesn’t help if it won’t disclose its name when setting the alarm!
I’ve applied a simple temporary workaround to ignore alarms set before 0600, wrapping my updated AlarmClock item processing with
if ((AlarmClock.state as DateTimeType).getZDT().getHour() > 5)
Hopefully that will help others with the same problem where the phantom alarm is distinct in time from intentional alarms. Would it be possible to add null to the blacklist of ignored alarms sources as a longer term fix without losing genuine alarms?
You need to install the app from F-Droid once the change is merged and released, as Play Store doesn’t allow this permission. Once we know the app sending invalid alarm clocks, it can be added to the ignore list and you can continue using the app from Play Store (if you do so).
