Android get list of active alarms

Question

Is there any way to get a list of all the active alarms in the android device programmatically in our application programmatically.Just point me out to some links that can b

Answer 1

I just ran into this issue with my new phone. I migrated data from an older phone and in hindsight what I think happened was that an inactive alarm app suddenly activated, or a disabled alarm in that app enabled after migration. At any rate, what happened was that suddenly an alarm that I couldn't identify went off every day at 8:30.

The following outlines how I solved it. If you don't care about that, scroll to the TL;DR at the end.

Troubleshooting Process

The process I used was to use adb as described in other answers. However, if you do this, you'll quickly get overwhelmed. The output for me was a 2,000+ line output with this laconic message somewhere around line 260:

Pending alarm batches: 130

This is because these aren't what you and I would call alarms. Instead, they are various apps asking to be woken up at a particular time (e.g. a mail app asking to be awoken in a minute to check for new mail). So I guess alarms, but for apps. What I did was to first identify how a "proper" alarm looked. I already had two alarms in the official alarm app enabled and they had rung in the last 24 hours. So I first ran:

adb shell dumpsys alarm > two-alarms.txt

I then disabled one of the two alarms and ran:

adb shell dumpsys alarm > one-alarm.txt

I then compared the two outputs and noticed that most of the differences were to do with timestamps (which makes sense -- they are run at different times and the output is heavily focused on "what should I do X milliseconds from now"). For example, I'd see diff outputs like this:

287c293
<       type=3 expectedWhenElapsed=+1m51s619ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+1m51s619ms whenElapsed=+1m51s619ms maxWhenElapsed=+1m51s619ms when=+1m51s619ms
---
>       type=3 expectedWhenElapsed=+1m48s727ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+1m48s727ms whenElapsed=+1m48s727ms maxWhenElapsed=+1m48s727ms when=+1m48s727ms

I re-ran the diff, filtering out lines containing type=:

$ diff -I 'type=' two-alarms.txt one-alarm.txt|less

This still contains a lot of noise, but the relevant sections are easier to locate. For example, the first material difference I found was this:

561c567,573
< Batch{b03e994 num=1 start=1851593838 end=1851593838 flgs=0x1}:
---
> Batch{849c837 num=1 start=1851593838 end=1851593838 flgs=0x5}:
>     RTC_WAKEUP #0: Alarm{e855db5 statsTag *walarm*:com.google.android.gms.reminders.notification.ACTION_REFRESH_TIME_REMINDERS type 0 when 1606626000000 com.google.android.gms}
>       tag=*walarm*:com.google.android.gms.reminders.notification.ACTION_REFRESH_TIME_REMINDERS
>       type=0 expectedWhenElapsed=+4h30m42s565ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+4h30m42s565ms whenElapsed=+4h30m42s565ms maxWhenElapsed=+4h30m42s565ms when=2020-11-29 00:00:00.000
>       window=0 repeatInterval=0 count=0 flags=0x5
>       operation=PendingIntent{543c4a: PendingIntentRecord{97867bb com.google.android.gms startService}}
> Batch{3f531a4 num=1 start=1851593838 end=1851593838 flgs=0x1}:

This is clearly a reminder I have set up (or perhaps a generic "wake me up to check for reminders" alarm that Google Reminders has set up to check for reminders).

Some more digging in the output gives us:

1027c1033,1039
<       type=0 expectedWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m45s459ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m45s459ms whenElapsed=+1d13h20m45s459ms maxWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m45s459ms when=2020-11-30 08:50:00.002
---
>       type=0 expectedWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m42s566ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m42s566ms whenElapsed=+1d13h20m42s566ms maxWhenElapsed=+1d13h20m42s566ms when=2020-11-30 08:50:00.002
>       window=0 repeatInterval=0 count=0 flags=0x9
>       operation=PendingIntent{89757d2: PendingIntentRecord{127f2fd com.lge.clock broadcastIntent}}
> Batch{39e90a3 num=1 start=2045693838 end=2045693838 flgs=0x9}:
>     RTC_WAKEUP #0: Alarm{ba76fa0 statsTag *walarm*:com.lge.clock.show_quick_dismiss_noti type 0 when 1606820100000 com.lge.clock}
>       tag=*walarm*:com.lge.clock.show_quick_dismiss_noti
>       type=0 expectedWhenElapsed=+2d10h25m42s565ms expectedMaxWhenElapsed=+2d10h25m42s565ms whenElapsed=+2d10h25m42s565ms maxWhenElapsed=+2d10h25m42s565ms when=2020-12-01 05:55:00.000

So the official alarm app appears to be com.lge.clock, which makes perfect sense -- it's an LG phone. Let's look for that in the original output:

  u0a194:com.lge.clock +21s656ms running, 61 wakeups:
    +12s50ms 11 wakes 11 alarms, last -1d10h37m18s647ms:
      *walarm*:com.lge.clock.alarmclock.internal.for.lmk
    +8s338ms 17 wakes 17 alarms, last -1d12h42m26s219ms:
      *walarm*:com.lge.clock.show_quick_dismiss_noti
    +4s272ms 11 wakes 11 alarms, last -1d10h37m18s647ms:
      *walarm*:com.lge.clock.alarmclock.internal
    +1s2ms 11 wakes 11 alarms, last -1d10h38m15s71ms:
      *walarm*:com.lge.sizechangable.weather.action.force.update.currentonly
    +996ms 11 wakes 11 alarms, last -1d10h37m18s647ms:
      *walarm*:indicator

Here we can see that this app has had a number of alarms going off one day, 10 hours and 37 minutes and some seconds and milliseconds ago (-1d10h37m18s647ms). This makes sense. This output was ran at 18:32 (6:32pm) and one of my real alarms was set at 7:55. Recognizing how we can identify times of "last trigger", we can now search for that illusive 8:30 alarm. 8:30 is about one day, 10 hours, and two minutes from the time of the report, so we search for -1d10h2m and get:

  u0a235:net.fredericosilva.mornify +14s944ms running, 20 wakeups:
    +14s944ms 20 wakes 20 alarms, last -1d10h2m26s3ms:
      *walarm*:net.fredericosilva.mornify/.alarm.AlarmBroadcastReceiver

Hmm... what is net.fredericosilva.mornify? A quick search results in the Mornify Play Page. And lo and behold! I had Mornify installed with that alarm. I had totally forgotten that I had tested out this app in the past and forgot to delete it after I decided it didn't work for me. Problem solved!

TL;DR

Step 1:

Run the alarm output:

adb shell dumpsys alarm > my-alarms.txt

Step 2:

Figure out the relative time from now to the last time the illusive alarm ran. For example, if the time of running the output is 6:32:18pm and the alarm went off at 7am last morning, the difference is 6:32pm-7am+24 hours, or 1 day, 11 hours, 32 minutes, and 18 seconds (a spreadsheet can be handy here to do the time math for you).

Step 3:

Reformat the time difference as -DdHhMm, where D is the number of days, H is the number of hours and M is the number of minutes. We'll forget about seconds here to avoid problems with clock drift. In our example from before, this will be -1d11h32m.

Step 4:

Search for this string in the output from Step 1. If you don't find it, two to subtract or add a minute in the string to correct for clock differences.