Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android TV supports a sleep timer for falling asleep to your favorite shows, but it’s a bit bare-bones.
- A recent update shows Google working on few new features tied to sleep timer functionality.
- These could include notifications warning you of upcoming timers, and maybe even letting you extend them.
How we consume media has wildly changed over the past 20 years, but some of the same old habits still persist. You man have ditched cable TV for the streaming life, but even with an Android TV box in the living room, we still end up camped out on the couch, clicking away on the remote for hours on end. Luckily, some tools from our cable past have managed to stick around, and if you regularly find yourself drifting off while in the middle of streaming session, you may already be taking advantage of Android TV’s sleep timer. Now we’re checking out what could be some
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
If you weren’t even aware that Android TV offers a sleep timer, we’d forgive you, as Google has so far not done a heck of a lot to make it particularly accessible. While some OEMs do build Android TV devices with interfaces that make accessing the sleep timer reasonably convenient, by default it’s buried deep within settings menus, requiring a prohibitive number of remote taps to even get to. And once you do engage with it, it’s quite bare-bones — you can set a new timer, and see how much remains on the active one, but that’s about it.
Digging into version 1.0.756918669 of the Google TV launcher, we spotted some new strings that sure seem to hint at Google building out the functionality of its sleep timer:
Code
Cancel timer
Pause timer
Resume timer
%1$d seconds until TV turns off
%1$d minutes until TV turns off
Your sleep timer has ended, but something went wrong when turning off your TV. You can still turn it off manually
Unable to turn off TVWe don’t currently have anything like that ability to pause and resume, nor those kind of messages counting down the time remaining until the device powers off. While these seem straightforward enough, some other text is a little more confusing:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Clearly, we’re looking at some sort of notifications here, but we haven’t yet been able to view any in operation. It’s possible Google might give you a heads-up when there’s either 5 minutes or 45 seconds remaining on your sleep timer, letting you add additional time if needed. At least, that feels like a logical enough read, but the 45-second notification in particular is such an unusual timeframe (why not do it at 1 minute?) that we’re remaining very open to the possibility that we don’t yet have the full picture of what Google’s cooking up here.
Regardless of the details, something or other seems to be in the works for sleep timers on our Android-powered TVs, and we’ll keep digging for further evidence of exactly what Google’s building.
