Cell Near / Cell collection not working on HTC One (M7)?

[Freakadude]

Hi,

I just switched phones from my HTC One S to the HTC One (M7). I had a setup that was working fine for enabling wifi at work and at home and also to change ringer settings which were based on Phone Cell GSM tower location information.

Since i switched to the HTC One none of these profiles work as they should. I have tryed to redo all of my flows and i noticed that when i want to start collecting cells via the setup options either i get no results at all or sometimes only 1 (where it used to be maybe 3 in a certain area) and even with the 1 found the flow is not behaving correctly 9 times out of 10.

Cell reception as shown on my phone is fine and i also have no issue with making calls or losing signal etc so i would assume this is not a hardware issue with my phone. I have the same issue at my workplace and also at home so it seems to rule out possible weak cell coverage in certain areas as well. Nevertheless it seems that when Automagic is trying to get the cell id's it does not see them therefore the flows do not work as intended.

Can you please advise/check what the issue can be? I really like Automagic and since it worked fine on my previous phone this is really bugging me.

Thanks!

[Martin]

Hi,

Some devices only notify apps about changed cells when the screen is on. Does collecting cells work when the screen is on?
Did you already try the options "Wake device", "Turn Screen On" and "Force update" to see if the trigger begins working again?

Regards,
Martin

[Freakadude]

Hi,

The problem is not so much with the app keeping track with the changed cell id's but that sometimes its not seeing any cells at all while being clearly connected to the network and having 100% reception.

For instance i played around with some setting now and collected two cells after some time which i setup and it worked fine.

No i had to reboot my phone recently and now the profiles are again not working. When entering the app and clicking on collect cells it gives cells:0 and does not change for some reason even through i have reception.

Obviously this is why the flows do not work at this point but what i don't understand is why the app is not seeing any cells seemingly at random when i am actually in the app.

[Freakadude]

Hi,

Did some more further checking and it may not be an issue with the app after all. I downloaded a seperate app which shows me my network cell info when connected and it seems often times it gets a cell info = unknown which is strange because i can make calls etc. Whenever this cell network unknown changes back to a normal one then the flows work again.

So maybe it is an issue with the phone software after all that it does not allways recognize the actual cell tower id even though its connected. No idea how to fix that

[Martin]

Unfortunately I don't have a HTC one to test this.
Are there any special power saving features available on this phone? If there are, does it make a difference if you turn the power saving features off?

[Freakadude]

There is a power saving feature called sleep mode which turns off data connection after long periods of inactivity which i have disabled but unfortunately that also does not solve the problem.

I have downloaded an app called Netwrok Info II. In that app i can quckly check what the current cell network id the phone currently sees. And the issue is that it often switches to cell network id = unknown. When this happens the flows stop working or simply revert the actions because it assumes that the phone is not in the desired location anymore.

No idea if this is a general phone software issue or maybe something else. Before my HTC One i had an HTC One S and never had these issues so bit frustrated over this. :/

[Freakadude]

I may have found the problem (and the workaround). Since the HTC One is an LTE phone and my previous one wasen't i tried to change the Network mode from GSM / WCDMA / LTE auto to GSM / WCDMA auto only. Once i have done that the phone immediately was able to identify the cell tower network id. Of course this could be purely coincidental so only time will tell if this actually permanently fixes my issue but so far it seems to work.