Hi I am trying to implement the ambient mode. I have followed that sample https://github.com/android/wear-os-samples/tree/main/AlwaysOnKotlin and it is the same issue, it works fine on debug but not at all on release mode, the ambient mode isn't triggered

What is the compose version and hardware you are experiencing this issue? I just pushed my release build with ambient mode a couple days ago, the ambient mode is triggered in my case properly. Is it maybe an AlarmManager related issue for the particular example? I am still in compose 1.3.x and wear compose 1.1.0. My ambient update works on pixel watch, tic watch pro.

It doesn't seems to be compose related, the ambient state isn't emitted from the wearable controller in release mode. I have tried on emulator and on Samsung watch 4

In debug mode the ambient state for the AlwaysOnKotlin example works for me. I will try to test it with a release mode. The GW4 of mine has some general issues, such as AOD also not working. I probably will not use GW4 as reference. Can you test your release build using alwaysOn with another watch hardware?

I tried with a pixel watch a it is the same result

I can confirm, the issue stated by @florent on my pixel watch with the newest Jan 2023 update too. Debug build goes to ambient mode, a release build of the “AlwaysOn” example doesn’t trigger the ambient update. Although, I can see the screen will be dimmed a little bitte as shown in the video by florent.

I have completely removed the tooling lib and it still doesn't trigger at all for me in release mode

I think ambient mode support relies on reflection in some way, and R8 breaks it. You might want to look a bit into it and see if there are some keep rules to add

I haven’t added any rule to the

<http://proguard-rules.pro|proguard-rules.pro>

before. Is there any tutorial shows how i can do it for the ambient mode?

Looks like it, if I put only -dontobfuscate and -dontoptimize it still fails but with -dontshrink it works ok. It must be removing needed stuff

oh, then it also clarifies why my production app build works, I also have

shrinkResources false

release {
    debuggable false
    minifyEnabled false
    shrinkResources false

You can start by adding the class that supports ambient mode

I have added

-keep class com.google.android.wearable.**
-keep interface com.google.android.wearable.**
-keep enum com.google.android.wearable.**

still doesn't work

Have you looked at which class is using reflection under the hood.

I am guessing that's the

WearableActivityController

but I don't think you can have the source code of it

is this one

com.google.android.wearable.compat.WearableActivityController

they probably have updated the implementation under the hood and haven't updated the r8 rules

I think there's a compileOnly dependency to have, do you have it?

Yes that fixes it thanks! I am gonna do a PR