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We've had requests for anti-distraction features for one of our apps. The idea is while in certain parts of the app, the user does not want to be interrupted by incoming phone calls, alarms, or anything else. I don't know how much of this can be accomplished, or whether it is even being a "good citizen" to turn off all such behavior.

Two things we are know we can do when in the "no distractions" part of the app (and undo when leaving those parts):

  1. put the ringer in vibrate or silent mode. As far as we can tell, this does not turn off screen pop-ups for incoming phone calls, notifications of SMS. Because of that, this option is not particularly effective. (It helps the user to not distract anyone nearby, but not from being distracted.)
  2. enter airplane mode (as described here). This is fairly drastic, as it cuts off Internet connectivity. Our app currently does not need connectivity when this would be in effect, but that may change in the future. We have not tried to implement this, but there are apparently doubts as to whether it is even controllable at the app level.

Neither of these is 100% satisfactory, nor do these address things like alarms. Are there other anti-distraction techniques that we could implement in our app?

Community
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Ted Hopp
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  • Agree with the second link you posted. This would be poor behavior even if it were completely possible. IMHO, the best thing you could do is prompt the user to change the settings you mentioned and provide a link to the system settings. – Krylez Jul 27 '12 at 22:42

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I've found some open source projects which can handle phone calls (reject incoming calls). But for alarms, I think it's impossible. Because the system manages alarms, I guess you can't interact with such managers.

Anh3Saigon
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