[Android Apps and Games] donjoe0:
I've been getting some weird behavior after the last updates, I would say it's superdimming that isn't working like it used to but it might be something else.

While using the phone certain actions like turning it from portrait mode to landscape mode make the screen suddenly brighter and then it stays brighter - namely, brighter than I would expect given my VAB settings.

If I go to VAB to test it, I find that covering the sensor so it sees "zero" light does move the cursor down to the bottom of my graph, below the superdimming threshold, and the screen does get darker, but superdimming never activates, so I don't get that really low brightness I had previously carefully tweaked.

Now, with the sensor still covered, if I turn VAB auto brightness off and on again, tap the menu and tap Settings, presto! - I suddenly get superdimming turned on. (This doesn't work if I do it when the currently detected light level doesn't put the calculated brightness below the superdimming threshold.) BUT... the problem is superdimming will now look like it stays on even when the detected ambient light moves the calculated brightness above the superdimming threshold: the brightness will increase, but never to the maximum the phone is capable of. It just looks like the superdimming overlay is staying on all the time and preventing my screen from going to max brightness when I need it to, outside in the sunlight. That is until, like I said above, I do one of the actions that "crash" the superdimming thing and suddenly make all the brightness levels brighter.

I don't know, maybe this behavior is actually consistent with the VAB service crashing and restarting? (I don't think so, since I've set it so it disables the system auto brightness so even if VAB crashes I shouldn't get any more brightness updates.)

Or it might have something to do with an on/off option on my ASUS Padfone 2 called "Outdoor Mode" which VAB may have started interacting differently with. Before these recent updates, I could turn Outdoor Mode on or off manually in my phone's settings and it would just add a set level of brightness to whatever was set by VAB, so all VAB-generated levels would turn out brighter. With the current version of VAB, this manual setting doesn't seem to do anything anymore (or, to be more specific, turning it on and off only changes the brightness for half a second and then it gets back to what it was). Maybe what I'm seeing is my Outdoor Mode activating and deactivating when it damn well pleases. But then I don't understand why it would deactivate so reliably when doing the sequence of operations detailed above, with the VAB on-off and go to Menu > Settings while light=0.

Help? :)

LE:

OK, I just fiddled with it some more and I've found that turning the phone from portrait to landscape or back definitely has something to do with it: depending on whether the cursor is below or above the superdimming threshold, turning the phone so the whole screen gets redrawn will suddenly toggle superdimming. So if I have relatively-low brightness levels for the whole graph and according to the sensor I'm above the superdimming threshold and I turn the phone so the screen gets redrawn, superdimming will turn off and all brightness levels on the graph will be turned a notch higher in reality (not visible on the graph though, there nothing changes). Things will stay that way until I get the whole screen to redraw at a moment when the sensor says we should be below the superdimming threshold - then superdimming will be turned on and it will stay on no matter what else the sensor says afterwards, until the next full screen redraw.

This would also explain why I've seen this happen with such varied actions as turning the phone from portrait mode to landscape or back (whole screen gets redrawn), starting/stopping apps (whole screen gets redrawn), going to VAB's settings menu (whole screen gets redrawn) etc. Plus it makes me suspect more strongly that it's a superdimming problem and not an Outdoor Mode problem, since a full screen redraw sounds more like the kind of thing that would affect the superdimming overlay rather than the actual backlight.