Android exact Alarm is always 3 minutes off

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The issue seems to occur only on Samsung devices (e.g. Galaxy Grand, S4, S5, S6, Note 3, Note 4) with Lollipop (5.0, 5.1, 5.1.1). It seems that alarms are scheduled inexact when device is on battery with screen off. If device is charging or has screen on during scheduling alarm the issue will not occur.

You can verify if next alarm will be inexact with:

adb shell dumpsys alarm

I didn’t find perfect solution for this problem – only workarounds where each has some drawbacks:

  1. Use setAlarmClock instead setExact (see this answer). This works very well (not on all devices), but the issue with this solution is that the alarm will affect the system by showing alarm icon in status bar (if someone doesn’t have alarm clock set already) and displaying next alarm scheduled time on alarm widgets etc. Unfortunately while this works on Galaxy Grand with 5.1.1 it doesn’t on Galaxy S4 with 5.0.1.
  2. Enable screen before scheduling the alarm (I do this half second before scheduling next alarm to avoid race condition). Of course it is not good solution for every app to enable screen just to schedule next alarm.
  3. One bug report describing similar issue connects it with app package name length! I didn’t verify if it really fixes the issue, because changing package name is not an option for already published app.
  4. There is another report where someone claims this can be fixed by using WakefulBroadcastReceiver, but it doesn’t work in my case.

BTW This issue drives me crazy 🙂

Edit: Looks like this issue does not occur when there is keyword “alarm” or “alert” in the app package name (as pointed out by Mathieu H. in comments below).

I was also able to fix the issue manually by disabling App optimization in Battery settings (or in Smart Manager app). It seems it cannot be done programmatically, so you can try asking your users…

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