Android Silliness

Once upon a time I bought an Insignia smart speaker (with Google Assistant baked in) for my bedroom. I could set an alarm that would stream my choice of radio station using verbal commands ("Hey Google, set a radio alarm for ..."). It worked so well that Google decided to fix it.

At some point I saw a brief item in a tech feed about Google eliminating radio alarms in favor of some sort of automation thing, but my speaker kept on working and I ignored the story ... to my own peril. A few weeks ago, I canceled the existing alarm. When I went to set a new alarm, the speaker's response was "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that."

After a bit of research, I discovered that the Google Home app now has something called "automations". It turned out a bunch of predefined automations were set on my phone, none of which ever did anything (because I never uttered the necessary incantation?). None were anything I wanted, so I turned them all off and created a new one. Automations involve one or more "starters" (in my case, every day at 6:57 am), one or more "actions" (in my case, play the radio station I want) and a "configuration" (in my case, play it on the bedroom speaker). You can test the automation by tapping a button (and I did). It worked when triggered manually.

So began the adventure. On day 1, the new automation failed to do anything. I woke up on my own (belatedly), changed the time to five minutes or so after I awoke (call it 7:20 am), and it worked. So I reset it to 6:57 am, and the next day it again failed. Eventually I found a notification hidden away somewhere that the automation had failed due to scheduled down time being set. I went to the settings menu in the Home app, found "Digital wellbeing", and sure enough there was a downtime setting. It was set to expire at 8:00 am, leaving me confused as to why the 7:20 am test had worked, but whatever. I deleted it.

Next morning, no luck. I went to the settings for the speaker and found it had its own digital wellbeing setting, which I also deleted. Still no luck, and no notifications I could find as to why it did not work.

I'll skip over the details of a very unsatisfying online chat with a level 1 Google support person (who did not seem to grasp that the 7:20 test working implied that the speaker really was connected to the home WiFi) and an email exchange with a level 2 support person who wanted the speaker's serial number among other things. (That was two weeks ago. Nothing back so far.) With some experimentation, I discovered the following. If I set the alarm time prior to 7:00 am, it did not work at all. If I set it to exactly 7:00 am, it triggered at 7:00 am the first day and 7:02 am every day thereafter. If I set it to 7:01 am, it triggered at 7:01 am every day. (Note that the 7:01 setting triggered a minute before the 7:00 am setting did, which offended me as a mathematician due to the lack of monotonicity.)

Ultimately I got another notification about something to do with downtime, which made no sense to me since I had deleted the downtime settings for both phone and speaker. So I went into the phone settings (not the Home app, but the phone itself). After considerable vertical scrolling, I found "Digital Wellbeing & parental controls". Wallowing around in that, I found a "Bedtime mode" (which was turned off) and a "Do Not Disturb" menu. "Do Not Disturb" was turned off on the phone, but fortunately I got curious and burrowed into the menu. In the "General" section of that menu was a heading named "Schedules" saying I had three schedules set. Two of those were "Gaming" and "Game Dashboard" (no idea what they do or why they were turned on). I forget the title of the third one (I have since renamed it "sleeping"), but that turned out to be what was blocking the alarm. I left the start time at 11:00 pm and changed the end time to "6:45 am next day". It had been set to 7:00 am, which apparently was what caused issues. You can customize what things get blocked (via "Do Not Disturb behavior"), but I didn't bother. Curiously, there is a switch labeled "Alarm can override end time", which was (and remains) turned on. Since that did not allow the automation to trigger before 7:00 am, I assume it only applies to alarms and not automations.

With that tweak, the radio alarm via the speaker started working at 6:57 am, and so I am tentatively going to declare victory. Why we need digital wellbeing setting scattered all over the place under various names is a mystery to me, one of many.