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I have been using Viber for almost ten years on many devices (including Blackberries, Android phones and tablets, Windows and Linux PCs). Lately, my old Samsung tablet started to fail, so I bought a new tablet (Lenovo TB-8505F 8" Wifi only). I tried to activate Viber on this tablet as a secondary device which is the way I had used Viber for years: mobile phone is always my primary device; tablet and PCs are my secondary devices.

However, it seems that this new tablet is treated like a mobile phone by Viber (although it is a WiFi only device). So, Viber tries to activate this tablet as a primary device only.

As a comparison:

  1. On the old Samsung tablet, the "activation screen" which is displayed just after I enter my mobile phone number, shows the relevant QR code to be scanned by my primary device (phone). [This is the correct behavior].

  2. On the new Lenovo tablet, the "activation screen" which is displayed just after I enter my mobile phone number, shows that an SMS or phone call activation will be attempted [wrong behavior] just like the tablet were a primary device only (which it should not). In case I continue with the SMS/phone activation, my primary device (phone) gets disconnected [as expected].

I want to activate my new Lenovo Tablet as a secondary device. Is there a workaround to force Viber to "treat" this device as a secondary device?

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    Looks like Viber uses the screen size+resolution to determine if it is a smartphone or not. Based on their description it should work as a secondary device, hence this is a bug. I think the only way to solve this is to contact the Viber support and ask why they want your tablet only allow as primary device. – Robert Jun 7 '20 at 14:33
  • I already contacted Viber. So far I haven't got an acceptable response. For your information: My old Samsung tablet and the new Lenovo tablet have the same size and resolution: 8" and 1280 x 800 pixels. – FedonKadifeli Jun 7 '20 at 15:51
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I contacted Viber Support several days ago. Eventually the answer came from Viber Support (Ian). The steps are like this:

  • Remove Viber from your tablet (I added this step).
  • Go to tablet's Settings 🡆 Display 🡆 Display size and change from Default (or anything else) to Small.
  • Reboot your tablet so its dpi will change.
  • Install and activate Viber on the tablet as a secondary device (now you will see the expected QR code).
  • Change the Display size back to whatever it was before.
  • To be sure, reboot your tablet and test Viber.

Note: Unfortunately, I cannot check the "Display size" of my old Samsung tablet, because I already did a factory reset on it.

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Having the same issue with Samsung Galaxy TAB A 2019 and witnessing the crap support from Viber, I would like to point that the issue is indeed caused by the Viber device identification from screen resolution as Robert suggested. What is important is to differentiate screen resolution to one that can be identified as "tablet". In an Android developers site I found the following dp info:

Here's how other smallest width values correspond to typical screen sizes
320dp: a typical phone screen (240x320 ldpi, 320x480 mdpi, 480x800 hdpi, etc).
480dp: a large phone screen ~5" (480x800 mdpi).
600dp: a 7” tablet (600x1024 mdpi).
720dp: a 10” tablet (720x1280 mdpi, 800x1280 mdpi, etc).

For some reason my tablet had as factory default setting minimum width 533 dp! On Android 10 you have to dig deep to find this by activating Developer Options menu (Settings/About tablet/Software Information/7 taps on Build Label) and under Drawing label find the Minimum width setting. For a 10.1'' you can set it to 800 dp. After restart the installation as secondary device proceeds as normal.

I have to point that Viber support after passing them a slum dunk with the post from this forum and my minimum width setting did not even bother to look for an answer!! They sent me as a reply the summary of this post with the "recommendation" to find View and Small Screen setting on Android !! I hope that my recommendation to include a warning to their knowledge base (which kept sending me as a fix to this problem !!) would resolve future issues. Especially since it is so easy for a developer/ technical person from a multi million dollar company to spot and solve.

Thanks for the info provided by Robert and Fendonkadifeli!!

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What worked for me is running adb command:

   .\adb shell wm density             // to get current value X
   .\adb shell wm density 160         // to set density

,activate Viber hopefully as secondary device, and after that - revert value:

   .\adb shell wm density X`           // revert value to X(previously read value)

Also, running command .\adb shell wm density reset should revert density to initial value, but it faild to work for me.

You could try different values for density. As I understand it, lower value should correspond to larger screen size, ie. tablet.

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