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:
- 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?
- 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.
try entering with all communications turned off (bluetooth, location, wifi, nfc, flight mode on)
do you have wireless charging?
maybe it’s anti-theft tag detectors near the door.
The last time it happened, I turned off WiFi and BT as well as doing a reboot and it still happened.
I will go and try turning off cell connectivity and if that works, I’ll cycle through 2g/3g/4g/5g and see if it happens with all of them.
The other possibility, although I doubt it really but it’s worth checking for, is they might have a microwave link in the store for some reason, and your phone just kind of gets overwhelmed by all the unshielded energy.
I have no idea how you would even test for that since I don’t think phones can really receive microwave signals so they have no way to detect them but the energy would still mess with them.
Might tie in with what people were thinking about the wireless charging coils.
You could try and get in one of those RF shielding cases and see if that helps.
They are usually sold because people are concerned about contactless somehow being used to steal their money, but since that doesn’t work unless you unlock your phone it’s a bit of an unfounded concern. The cases do actually block RF, so while they’re a kind of con, they do also work.