Is there a way to permanently delete specific (phantom) alarms using adb shell?

Question

My phone has mysteriously created a phantom alarm meaning that no GUI app or widget shows this alarm on my phone and thus nothing allows me to see to set, delete, or view this alarm.

Using adb dumpsys alarm, I've found the offending alarm, which goes off M-F at 0630 HRS and it's incredibly annoying.

Using adb, I'm able to find the alarm daily, which means I'm able to find the Alarm ID, which in my case, right now, is ff691fe.

Is there a way I can delete this alarm permanently using adb? I'm assuming that this particular ID is likely not the root ID, but perhaps someone knows how I can find that? I'll keep looking around.

I just tried (with result from command)

b0q:/ $ service call alarm 3 i32 ff691fe
Result: Parcel(00000000    '....')

and this did not work, unfortunately. One thing I suspected and confirmed is that the ID changes after a timer elapses, but I've not yet determined how to get a parent ID (probably not correctly named there) for the alarm. Moreover, it's likely I'd need that ID to successfully permanently delete alarms.

Any assistance on this would be greatly appreciated. This seems like a huge bug in the android OS.

Answer 1

OK, it turns out that the service call did work, as far as I can tell. I just needed to tweak the command a little.

Most important thing was to correctly determine the ID of the alarm. Using the link here, one can find the ID. Note that the ID is in a specific section of the dumpsys alarm command. The format of the output for that command is confusing at first, but essentially you're looking for something like:

where ### in this is a number representing the number of alarm (not ### literally)

### pending alarms:
...
...
...
    RTC_WAKEUP #88: Alarm{5d74fad type 0 origWhen 1677671101000 whenElapsed 1028621179 com.sec.android.app.clockpackage}
      tag=*walarm*:com.samsung.sec.android.clockpackage.alarm.UPCOMING_ALERT
      type=RTC_WAKEUP origWhen=2023-03-01 04:45:01.000 window=0 exactAllowReason=permission repeatInterval=0 count=0 flags=0x5
      policyWhenElapsed: requester=+7h4m50s571ms app_standby=-1m20s270ms device_idle=-- battery_saver=-55s468ms tare=-2m1s488ms gms_manager=--
      whenElapsed=+7h4m50s571ms maxWhenElapsed=+7h4m50s571ms
      operation=PendingIntent{493d673: PendingIntentRecord{4efa417 com.sec.android.app.clockpackage broadcastIntent}}
      idle-options=Bundle[{android.pendingIntent.backgroundActivityAllowed=false, android:broadcast.temporaryAppAllowlistReasonCode=302, android:broadcast.temporaryAppAllowlistDuration=10000, android:broadcast.temporaryAppAllowlistReason=, android:broadcast.temporaryAppAllowlistType=0}]
    RTC_WAKEUP #89: Alarm{e3b8930 type 0 origWhen 1677671507448 whenElapsed 1029027627 com.samsung.android.rubin.app}
      tag=*walarm*:com.samsung.android.rubin.alarm.ACTION_PENDING_INTENT
      type=RTC_WAKEUP origWhen=2023-03-01 04:51:47.448 window=+2h0m0s0ms repeatInterval=0 count=0 flags=0x0
      policyWhenElapsed: requester=+7h11m37s19ms app_standby=-1m20s270ms device_idle=-- battery_saver=-55s352ms tare=-1h17m15s404ms gms_manager=--
      whenElapsed=+7h11m37s19ms maxWhenElapsed=+9h11m37s19ms
      operation=PendingIntent{e4639a9: PendingIntentRecord{84e3864 com.samsung.android.rubin.app broadcastIntent}}
...
...
...

In this example, RTC_WAKEUP #88 is the pending alarm. In that string, the output Alarm{5d74fad type shows the alarm ID, which is 5d74fad.

Now, executing:

service call alarm 3 s16 5d74fad

deleted my alarm. Whether this works for others or not, I cannot say. It worked for me. The output from the command is nebulous at best. I basically just had to wait for the next day. One thing I noticed, though, was when I ran this command, my phone switched to GMT (rather than localtime). Simply going in to settings for date time and toggling on/off the automatic daylight time and automatic date time fixed that.