Apps Forcing wired headset (headphones and mic)

[Pienats]

Hi,

The company I work for is developing a device that connects and communicates through an Android phone's audio jack.
Recently we've run into a problem where a specific phone (Samsung S7710 Galaxy Xcover 2) does not always recognize the microphone part.

Looking at AudioManager | Android Developers it would seem that it should be possible to force a "wired headset" (ie. headphones and microphone) indication, but documentation isn't very clear how this would be achieved.

My gut feel is that this is most likely controlled via the setParameters() call, but so far I have been unable to find anything in documentation, code or the internet to indicate what the appropriate key:value pair would be.

Can anyone give me pointers as to possible key:value pair values, or, if I'm on the wrong path to begin with, in which way can this be done?

The phone in question currently runs Android 4.1.2.

 

[Rukbat]

Does it always recognize the mic on certain headsets? If so, the problem could be that the mic on other headsets isn't drawing enough current (or is drawing too much current) to look like a mic to the phone. We're talking about devices that wholesale for about US$0.69 (about 7 Rands), so the quality control (and even the amount of time spent on thinking about how to design the headset) isn't going to be the greatest. Over the years I've found many cheap headsets that various phones wouldn't recognize. (And the phone jack could be intermittent.)

Make sure that there are no hardware problems before looking for software solutions - you can't use software to compensate for hardware that doesn't work.

 

[Pienats]

Our device acts as the headset with mic. It works perfectly fine on a wide range of other phones.Our hardware engineers are looking into a workaround involving a resister change, but this is not desirable, as it might break existing supported phones. I'm merely looking at software workarounds in the meantime (dual-pronged approach). The main reason we're trying to make this phone work, is that one of our larger clients are using these.

One reason why we are considering a software approach to begin with, is that we've found that inserting the device quickly (ie. just snap it in) causes it to be recognized as headphones only, while inserting it "slowly" (ie. first insert it to around 95% of the way, then a second or so later completely) it does actually register as a headset with a mic.

Apparently this has also been verified with an actual headset. So it seems to be more of an issue on the phone.