Green location indicator very distracting when watching full screen videos

Pad

Starting with Android 12 and 13, we have these new green dots in the status bar which are permission indicators for microphone, video and location.

It's nice to see what kind of sensors are being accessed at any given time but is anyone facing the problem that they are a bit intrusive in the UI when watching full screen videos?

I have an app called OwnTracks which runs in the foreground all the time periodically sends the phone's location to a remote server of mine. This makes the green location indication to go on and off all the time, it is a bit annoying when using the phone normally but I don't mind it that much. The problem is that it shows when watching full screen videos, which makes the experience very distraction.

I opened an issue about this in the link below but I am wondering if there is anyone else facing this issue.

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1879

unwat

Pad

Honestly, I agree that it's annoying since it's not just the green dot that's appearing, but I mostly just push myself to ignore it.

Ideally, Google would make the indicator less intrusive since it would affect AOSP as well.

For now maybe you can use profiles to get around this. Maybe have a profile for OwnTracks that's on in the background, or a profile for video watching. I personally have a separate profile for videos since Netflix and Disney+ always catch me using my VPN, so I only see this when watching videos using LibreTube in my main profile.

Pad

unwat

Thanks for your reply :)

The idea of putting OwnTracks on a separate profile sounds very interesting. Is the app going to keep running even if I never switch back to the second profile?

On another note, I am wondering if the following adb commands are supposed to work. I have seen reports on the internet of people who managed to disable the location indicator on their Android 13 devices but for some reason is not working for me on GrapheneOS. I wonder if this is an unintentional bug in GrapheneOS but I don't have other Android 13 devices to test this on.
$ adb shell cmd device_config put privacy location_indicators_enabled false default
$ adb shell cmd device_config put privacy location_indicator_settings_enabled true default

jarell

Pad Apps in separate profiles will keep running as long as you don't end the session. The apps also won't start after a reboot without unlocking the profile for the first time after the reboot.

unwat

Pad

To be honest, I don't know those adb commands, but I think I figured out what might work. But first, since we're on this discussion forum I think I should write a couple things first...

The GrapheneOS team always dissuades people from making changes to the system using adb. If you make changes and something breaks later, nobody here will know what changes you made and won't be able to help you. Also, using adb or developer tools on personal "production" devices is discouraged since it opens up a massive attack surface.

Also, I don't know if these changes will work for you. I haven't tested them on my own phone because, honestly, I'd rather not. I'd suggest you look in to what I suggest before you do it. I have linked some stuff that should help with that.

Anyway if you're dead set on attempting to disable those indicators using adb, I'll share what I found...

Based on this commit, this list of device manager properties, and the adb commands you listed, maybe these will help:

adb shell cmd device_config put privacy location_indicators_small_enabled false default
adb shell cmd device_config put privacy location_indicators_show_system false default

And there's a last per-user setting that you'd want to change. First get the user's user ID from pm list users (I'm using user 2 in the example below). If you're only using the owner profile, just skip this part and don't add the --user # part in the command below.

Then adb shell cmd settings put --user 2 secure LOCATION_SHOW_SYSTEM_OPS 0

Other than those three changes, I'm unaware of any other things that GrapheneOS changed from AOSP that affect this location indicator, so hopefully that works.

mobos

@unwat thx for sharing the workaround, works like a charm.

SoulKeeper

I don't know how hard it is to give a toggle and let the users decide it they wanna see the green dot on the status bar or not. It certainly doesn't compromise privacy or security. The green dot appearing on the status bar every two minute is really irritating and distracting at the same time.