There is a maintenance related outage of my utility company.
SInce I have a PV system with batteries I didn’t even notice that power went out.
But my electric induction stove was not happy with lights flickering and some kind of beeping sound.
When I opened up the sense app I saw there was some voltage but not within specs: 55 volts per leg.
I tried to make a screenshot of it but to my surprise the screenshot is just BLACK.
For Security reasons Android prevents screen shots of pages containing MAC addresses.
Android doesn’t know the actual image isn’t of the mac addr. just that the ‘System’ page contains a mac addr.
so the entire page is blocked.
There is no mac address in the picture that I took with the other phone.
There is one on the page, but I scrolled down away from that for obvious reasons.
I googled “android screenshot mac address” but did not find any reference.
It gave me not any useful results.
I then opened the app of one of my solar inverters , which shows the mac address and was able to make a screenshot.
Weird, can also take captures of integrated device mac addrs… Apparently it’s through a ‘flag’ the dev’s enable that prevents it. Android has this option to allow devs to prevent financial or sensitive data from being easily captured. But no one really uses it, which begs the question who at Sense knew how to enable it, why and why don’t banks and whatnot use this flag option more?
Glad you are filing a ticket. Seeing the same thing in the Sense Facebook group. Joel Scherzer has pointed out alternate places to see / record exactly the same Signals information (web app or Power Quality section of Android app) as a short term workaround for anybody who really needs that capability right now.
I ran the exact same tests that you ran and got the exact same results. My Android phone (version 13) would not take a screenshot of the SENSE ‘system’ page that has the monitor’s MAC address.
I tested @obscuredtrip 's theory using a different APP that displayed a MAC address. The screenshot worked correctly on other APP’s.
The issue is directly related to a screen setting in the phone’s SENSE APP.
My screen shot block is limited to just the Settings > Monitor tab/screen. (My reply to @kevin1)
Why is the (android) Sense app NOT allowing to take a screenshot? (quoted from Danny)
I have an Amazon Fire Tablet 7 (12th gen, 2022) that I’ve rooted and installed the Sense app (v51.0) (among other apps). I just gave this a try, to take a screenshot of the System page in Sense, and it doesn’t let me.
I hit the square button so I can switch apps, then I hit the screenshot button (which shows the Sense app as just a white screen), and it gives me an error message, “This action isn’t allowed by the app or your organization”. Any other screen will show as normal (not white) and screenshot works fine.
I went into app permissions and updated any/every option as far as system permissions, camera, location, etc, and still gives me the same results.
“Security compliance” hints to me that Sense is working with enterprises, likely in Europe where the MAC addresses is sometimes considered as personal information under GDPR. Just a thought… No real knowledge.
As an FYI. This screenshot is entirely possible on the iOS version so an attempt to justify this with European regulations seems somewhat feeble.
If they insist on this protection, then I agree that blocking a screenshot of 15+ informational items, because of just one seems silly. They can trivially make the MAC address line not show it, but show a disclosure arrow instead and only block when disclosed. Or, as you suggest a larger redesign (which might not be a bad idea anyway).
@dannyterhaar, all super valid points. On point c), just screenshot the Power Quality view. It displays real-time L1 and L2 voltages as well in “Voltage now”, (even when the graph hasn’t been updating, AFAIK).
