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- Hacker News
- Where are those files stored on my phone? I want to check this for my ISP. Edit: git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Carr... && cd CarrierConfig && grep -rnie inflateby jesprenj
- Android users can enter *#*#INFO#*#* on the phone app's numeric keypad to open a diagnostics tool, which includes a submenu that shows signal strength in dBm.
It's handy for locating sweet spots and dead zones in my home.
by foresto - https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...
Is the commit that added it.
by charcircuit - Someone should contact the author and ask for an explanation.by sharts
- Is there any reason to believe this mechanism is actually there to help carriers deceive users? To me this looks like it's intended to address some other issue, like perhaps "I have zero bars shown, what do you mean I'm still connected? That that clearly means I'm disconnected..." I feel like anything intended to lie to users would not be implemented in this manner.by dataflow
- Think about all the various policies, dishonesty, PR spin, marketing, price-gouging, hidden fees, elimination of lifetime programs, and yes, outright fraud you've become aware of over the years. Just sit quietly for a moment, let those ideas stew. And if after one minute of silence you still feel the need to bestow upon these companies the most generous interpretation of their conduct possible, well, I'll be slightly surprised but I suppose that would conclude our conversation.
- Is it more common to complain to the carrier about unexpected reception, or unexpected lack thereof?by userbinator
- AT&T sold themselves on More Bars https://www.wired.com/2007/08/att-more-bars-i/by Maxious
- I wonder if it’s more intuitive that way.
Like what Apple does with stopwatch.
https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displa...
by alberth - It is still tracking the actual time though.
This signal strength is straight up lying about the actual signal strength
by vachina - It seems easier to use the ceilingby godelski
- Heh, funny. I recently implemented a countdown for a teleprompting app and that's exactly what I ended up doing to make the countdown "feel right".
The countdown in question doesn't display fractions of a second so it would immediately switch from "5 seconds left" to "4 seconds left" which just doesn't feel right. Adding 0.5s solved the issue.
by kybernetyk - This is just rounding to nearest instead of down or up, not statically adding a whole interval (as the author realizes in an addendum).
- There is a way to switch the bars to actual numeric dBM: https://www.techbout.com/display-iphone-signal-strength-in-n...
(Probably a way to do it on Android, too)
A CSR showed me this while debugging network connectivity issues with my phone.
by Leftium - IIRC this really took off with the antennagate fiasco on the iphone 4. I was working for Verizon at the time and this was also the first one we were able to sell. I forget who it was that did it but I believe it was Apple in response to people "holding their phone wrong" so they bumped everything up a bar so you couldn't tell. There was a lot of competition at the time but also all the androids had better margins so they wanted us to sell those instead.by sanex
- > but also all the androids had better margins
That's not something I was expecting to hear
by SkiFire13 - Original commit that introduced the change: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
I don't know if I want my name on an open source project attached to a commit whose only purpose is to lie?
by OptionOfT - I would assume that this was a carrier request/demand that got filtered down to some poor employee that had to implement it. There’s a linked bug, but the bug is restricted.by wolfd
- You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. And once it's down to 2 bars, it barely works, if at all.
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
by metadat - Android phones show 1 bar pretty reasonably and fair. To illustrate this, I have 1 bar on both my SIM modules right now, which translates to the -125 dBm signal on both. So the connection is up, but it is borderline low.
Wifi-calling to the rescue :)
by Yizahi - For some reason, I've spent several weeks (across a few years) in Italy with exactly one bar of signal strength on an iPhone when roaming on Vodafone.
It must actually be tricky to space out towers that sparsely without creating any obvious coverage gaps, but if anyone is up to the task, it's certainly Vodafone (let's not talk about the actual service quality, though).
by lxgr - Consider yourself blessed, the one place in my neighborhood where I get one bar on LTE is the same place I once was repairing my car. Awful experience but the rest of the subdivision is fine.by tiznow
- I’ve always just blamed the extreme bloat of the web and lack of design around poor connections for 2bar lack of performance. HN usual works fine on but that’s about it for sites I visit.by davemp
- Try going into a Home Depot. I don't think I've ever found one where aside from fairly near the front I've had other than 0 or 1 bars, across a variety of phones and carriers and in neighborhoods where the signal outside the store was strong.
The net is telling me this is because of the aisle after aisle of tall metal shelving and the building itself also has a lot of metal in the construction.
It is quite annoying when you are trying to use the Home Depot app to look up something.
by tzs - I had a very dangerous 1-bar the other day. You see I was in the Canadian wilderness relying on iPhone text-over-satellite, which works well, but only when you have no signal. I needed to relay a message to the rest of my group when suddenly I find myself with one bar of 3G that was completely and totally inoperable. No messages were getting through. But to make matters worse, since my phone thought it had a bar, it wouldn't activate satellite. I tried every setting and then for 20 minutes hiding behind various rocks to try to get my one bar to go away when finally I found a spot that would let me satellite text again.by pants2
- Humans are strange indeed.
I work with cellular BDA-DAS[1] gear sometimes, and I don't recall the last time I looked at the signal strength display on my phone. It has probably been years.
For me: It either works, or it doesn't work. It is either fast-enough, or impossibly-slow. It's very binary, and the bar graph at the top never told me a damned thing about what I should expect.
[1]: Bi-Directional Amplifier, Distributed Antenna System. In theory, such constructs can make indoor cellular coverage quite good inside of buildings that previously had none. In reality it can be... complicated. And while the bar graph doesn't mean anything, I still need ways to see what's happening as I spend hours, days, or [sometimes!] weeks surveying and troubleshoot and stuff. The phone can report things like RSRP, RSRQ, and some other tasty bits instead of just a useless graph -- and from there, I can sometimes make a hand-waving guess as to what I may reasonably expect for performance.
But that stuff is normally pretty well hidden from view.
by ssl-3 - > You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone.
I do.
I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.
Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D
by eqvinox - Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www....
"Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"
by gadders - fixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5loby crtasm
- At least there's some merit to that, since many network don't yet use a 5G core (or SIM cards aren't capable of using it), so the definition of when you "are on 5G" is really murky: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-nsaby lxgr