Camera LED As Flashlight on Non-Rooted Android Phones
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We all know that Android does not allow the camera LED to be controlled directly from apps and hence, you cannot use the camera LED as a Torch or Flashlight unless you are rooted. There are many flashlight apps on the Android Market Place but none of them will work for you if you don’t have a rooted phone. BUT this changed recently. I use a brilliant app called “quick settings” which keeps an icon in the notification bar and I can pull it down and change any settings without leaving other apps. It has a flashlight function but so far it used to work by turning on the screen with a white screen, which was a less than ideal solution. I upgraded to the latest version a few days ago (1.9.4 p1). While messing around with the settings, I wandered across the flashlight settings which allows you to choose what kind of flashlight you want. Now, I’m not sure whether this setting was present earlier or not but I decided to give it a try and chose LED instead of screen (Screenshot below):
Once done, I went back to the main screen and pressed the flashlight icon in the top right (Screen shot below) and voila! my camera LED switched on. I’m a happy camper now as this is a life saver many times. Try this out for yourself by searching for “Quick Settings” in the market and let me know if it works on your phone too (mine is a nexus one).
© Shantanu Goel | Camera LED As Flashlight on Non-Rooted Android Phones
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This post has 7 comments
July 30th, 2010
Sigh… doesn’t work for me on MotoDroid (classic)… and I _am_ rooted.
August 3rd, 2010
This is not true. I got my wife a Moto Droid and she is using Tesla LED on her non-rooted phone just fine.
August 3rd, 2010
DroidLight by Motorola has worked quite awhile. Not rooted, but LED based and works very well on a Droid.
August 3rd, 2010
oh ok.. looks like Moto Droid has somewhat different implementation for the LED and hence it can be used by droid-specific apps without rooting
August 4th, 2010
Seems to me one only needs to write an application which captures the camera feed, but doesn’t do anything with the image. That would turn on the light, no? What am I missing?
August 4th, 2010
@pepe: I actually tried that a few months ago. Unfortunately i wasn’t able to do it without having a preview window. I didn’t work much on it afterwards though to try any workarounds..
August 5th, 2010
LED light does not function on the Incredible, at least it gives you a nice message telling you that it won’t work.