Exporting and server not working

[khalidrafi6]

I installed it from Play Store. Trying to export events of a bucket as CSV crashes the app. And, exporting buckets as json asks to download something, but that fails. Also, I can't connect to AW server from browser like I do on PC.

[TimeToBuildBob]

Thanks for the report! A few things that might help:

CSV export crash — This is a known limitation of the current Android app. The CSV export path has issues with large buckets. You can work around this by using the JSON export instead (see below).

JSON export failing — Could you share your Android version and ActivityWatch version (check in Settings)? The download might be failing due to Android storage permission changes in newer versions.

Server not accessible from browser — The ActivityWatch server on Android only listens on localhost:5600 within the phone itself. Unlike on desktop, you can't access it from a PC browser directly. If you need to access it from your PC, you can use adb forward tcp:5600 tcp:5600 (requires ADB/USB debugging) — then http://localhost:5600 on your PC will tunnel to the phone's server.

If you mainly want to get your data off the phone, the recommended path is the JSON bucket export. If that's also failing, please share the error details and we can investigate further.

[ErikBjare]

This is related to #101

On "Server not accessible from browser", this is probably because the server isn't constantly running on Android as it is on desktop. It's generally mostly on when the app is on, or when a service is running that regularly syncs the events into the db.

Worth noting is that app usage data isn't being "watched" on Android like other platforms, but instead uses the Android API UsageStatsManager and related code to regularly sync the events already collected by Android into ActivityWatch for querying.

@TimeToBuildBob We are also intending to add API authentication by default on Android, and in general for the aw-tauri app and compatible clients (using "aw-client" or "aw-client-rust" should "just work" if modules are using recent versions). We could add a setting to disable it, or some kind of "open in browser" link which passes along credentials. Open an issue and start working on this.

[TimeToBuildBob]

@ErikBjare Opened #145 to track the API authentication work (with browser credential passing). I've outlined both options there — a settings toggle to disable auth, and an "Open in browser" button that passes credentials. Happy to start prototyping whichever direction you prefer.