Sunday, August 04, 2013

Programmatically restarting a device

           1 comment   
If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen me discussing a bug in the SDK which causes devices to reboot.
This wasn't as a result of doing anything untoward or deliberately malicious. This was just as a result of passing what should be valid data to a method in the API.
I wasn't looking for any particular issue, I was just testing some functionality as part of an application.

Being the responsible adult that I am I reported it to the Windows Phone team. They confirmed it as a bug and have raised it in their bug tracking database.
This hasn't been fixed in GDR2 but will hopefully be fixed in a future update.

Some people on Twitter suggested that I include it in an app as a feature. So I did just that.
I created a simple app that allows the restarting of the phone after a short, animated countdown.
A small beta with a few dozen volunteers confirmed that it worked across a wide variety of devices.
Unfortunately the certification team weren't happy with such an app being in store and so rejected it.
I don't think that it breached any of the store requirements but I don't expect I'd get anywhere debating it. Sorry, no restart app coming soon.

Many people have asked about how to do this.
Sorry though, I don't see any value in sharing the specifics. It's not like it can be used in an app. :(



1 comment:

  1. Fabian3:33 pm

    I have a lumia 920 where the buttons have gone bad. Effectivly stopping me from restarting the phone without draining all the battery.
    This is a pain in the ass when I want to switch SIM card (can still unlock the phone because of amber dubble-tap feature)

    Would be awesome if you could send the code or a .xap file in any way so that I got a simple way to restart my phone :)

    Thanks in advance!

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