this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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I visit a store regularly and every time to try to reference something on my phone in that store, I get UI crashes. The phone works fine everywhere else. Its a Oneplus9 running a custom rom.

Two questions:

  1. What could cause this? Is some sort of interference in the store crashing things? Is the bright light causing the luminosity sensor to overwhelm. Is the store trying to mess with or track my phone in some way and all my modifications, privacy configurations, etc. are choosing to crash instead of allow it?
  2. Do you have any ideas about how I can figure out what is causing it? Spectrum analysis with a flipper zero or something similar, logs of some kind on the phone, process of elimination? Links are appreciated if it requires advanced nerd cred (I'm probably intermediate with Linux, Android and tech in general, except networking where my knowledge is mediocre bit growing).

I am beyond curious what is going on because it is so weird that it works perfectly everywhere, but the UI keeps rebooting in this one store.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It sounds to me like perhaps the store has bluetooth beacons in place. It's a fairly under-utilized piece of tech, so there's a strong likelihood that your custom ROM doesn't support it properly. It's mostly just used for customer tracking, anyway, so the devs of your ROM may have either ignored the feature or deliberately disabled it in some way.

This article talks about what these sorts of beacons in retail stores are used for: https://www.itransition.com/retail/beacons

You mentioned scanning with a Flipper Zero; I'd suggest scanning to see what sort of BLE devices show up in the store.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

I think this is the most likely theory yet. I don't install loyalty apps, but if my phone gets the signal and tries to access something that isn't there because the devs ripped it out that could explain the instability. It would also make me like the devs more as I don't want to relieve advertising or be tracked. :-)

Let me see what I can figure out.