Army Knife for Android FAQ


Flashlight

The flashlight does not light the LED of the camera.
Unfortunately there’s no standard way to light the LED and it’s not easy to implement it for the devices we don’t own.
We’re working hard to try to be compatible with the 1600+ different smartphones/devices you can buy all over the world. Please be patient.
Having said that, before you give up, please be sure you’ve tried these:

  • press MENU key or the settings icon
  • press Settings
  • press Flash method used
  • try the other method

If it doesn’t work, please check you have Enable camera flash enabled:

  • start the Flashlight tool
  • press MENU key or the settings icon
  • press Settings
  • select Enable camera flash
  • press BACK key and verify if camera LED is on

Compass

Where is the compass!?!
Compass doesn’t work
Compass doesn’t point to north
Compass isn’t accurate

Compass depends on your device’s magnetometer sensor. If your device doesn’t have one (For instance Moto G5 series doesn’t) the compass icon is not shown.
If you have such a sensor, the applet reads degrees information from it and displays the data a human-friendly manner. The compass tool can’t improve the quality or reliability of the information received by the device.
The magnetic sensors can give you wrong data if you’re near a magnet, a big iron object, if you’re inside a building or a running electronic device.
It’s possible you’re wearing a magnet and you don’t know it: some jacket buttons are magnetic, for instance.
If your smartphone is wearing a case, be careful: some cases can disturb the magnetic sensor. Try the compass after removing the case.
If the problem is that the compass doesn’t seem accurate, you have to consider that it’s not easy to “pack” a magnetic sensor inside a small electronic device. Sometimes, however, you can “calibrate” the sensor by performing a fast “figure 8” movement of the smartphone. It’s worth a try 😉
If the compass always point north, please try selecting the menu option “Use alternative mode”.


Calculator

Calculator: percent button doesn’t work.
Our implementation of the the % function follows the supposed “most common” implementation of the function. You can find the idea behind it here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/01/10/7047497.aspx


Timer

There is no longer a sound when the timer expires
Even if “Use speaker” is checked, when the timer expires no sound is emitted
Since version 1.3, the timer uses the Android standard notifications system. The good news is it works better when in standby, during a conversation and in other “special cases”. The bad news is that the default behaviour can be changed by vendors, so if you don’t have sound, please have a look at the system menus.
It’s possible in a newer version we’ll put the old alarm implementation back, as an alternative to the new one (via a menu option).


Magnifying glass/mirror

The magnifying glass/mirror doesn’t fit the entire screen (as in previous versions).
With version 1.3 we changed the way these tools display the camera image, in order to be compliant with the vendor suggested size. In some models this results in a very small image. Since version 1.4.0 it is possible to set landscape mode, that sometimes helps to resolve this issue.

The magnifying glass zoom doesn’t work
The zoom feature doesn’t work in some devices. For instance
it doesn’t work on Google’s Nexus S. In other models it works in standard mode but it doesn’t in macro mode.

The magnifying glass shows everything rotated by nn degrees
Please use the magnifying glass menu option to fix the rotation error. It works in 90% of devices.
If it doesn’t work, please try to set landscape mode.


Unit Converter

Please introduce a currency converter in Unit Converter
A currency converter requires the permissions to use networking. We chose to ask as few permissions as possible, so for now this feature is not possible.

The unit converter is missing XXX, YYY, ZZZ
We tried to include the most common conversions. For sure we can add some more that are missing.
What we don’t want to do is to add all possible categories/units, because there are more appropriate tools such as standalone unit converters, that handle specific categories/units extremely well.
Too many categories/units make it difficult to find the most used ones (yards <--> metres, Kilograms <--> Pounds, …).


General questions

Why do you need to be allowed to take pictures and videos?
We’re working hard to turn on the camera LED of all Android devices.
Unfortunately the vast majority of them don’t allow you to control the LED without requesting the permission to take pictures.
It’s easy to verify that all the featured flashlight apps do the same thing:
Have a look on the “permissions” tab of the top downloaded flashlight apps

We sincerely would like to avoid this permission, and if we find a way to avoid it,
we will. However, we’re not asking for permission to use the network, nor the permission to write to flash memory, so even if the app takes a picture (and it doesn’t) it won’t be able to save it or send it to anybody.

There is no longer a sound when the timer expires
Even if “Use speaker” is checked, when the timer expires no sound is emitted
Since version 1.3, the timer uses the Android standard notifications system. The good news is it works better when in standby, during a conversation and in other “special cases”. The bat news is that the default behavior can be changed by vendors, so if it doesn’t make sounds, please have a look at the system menus.
It’s possible in a newer version we’ll put the old alarm implementation back, in alternative to the new one (by menu option)

The size of the magnifying glass/mirror doesn’t fit the entire screen (as in previous versions).
With version 1.3 we changed the way these tools display the camera image, in order to be compliant with the vendor suggested size. In some models it ended up with a very small image. We’ll try to fix this problem in a next release

The magnifying glass zoom doesn’t work
The zoom feature doesn’t work in some smartphone models. For instance
it doesn’t work on Google’s Nexus S. In some other models it works in standard mode but it doesn’t in macro mode.

The magnifying glass shows everything rotated by nn degrees
Please use the magnifying glass menu option to fix the rotation error. It works in 90% smartphone models