Lets Talk About: Why You Can’t Turn Off Glance While Charging Windows Phones

I believe you will totally agree with me here that Glance screen is undoubtedly one of the top features of Lumia phones, and although some other phone makers are trying to offer similar implementations - as is the case of Samsung and its own Always On display on the S7 and Note 7 - Microsoft’s version just seems to make more sense and work correctly.

But there still are things that need to be improved about Glance screen and, unexpectedly, Microsoft is making changes that actually make the feature worse than before.

Feature removed for improved usability
 

For instance, turning off Glance screen while the phone is charging is no longer possible because the company removed this option for usability purposes. This is what a firm engineer explained in a comment posted in the Feedback Hub as a reply to a request to allow users once again to disable Glance while charging.

“Thank you for your feedback! Some less used features have been removed from Settings in order to simplify lookup and improve the usability. This includes removing the option to turn off Glance while the phone is charging,” the engineer said.

“At the same time, this release implements a new system to prevent burn-in on devices while Glance is ‘on’. This is why you no longer see the clock moving up the Glance screen over time. Your feedback has been forwarded to the feature team, and the option to disable Glance is under consideration for future releases.”

Microsoft’s “new system to prevent burn-ins on devices while Glance is on” probably refers to the new behavior that no longer moves the time around every minute, but instead flashes the on-screen text every 60 seconds.

And yet, this still doesn’t seem to prevent ghosting, as there are plenty of users who have complained about this problem on various Lumia devices, including the Lumia 640 and 830. Hopefully, Microsoft will address these issues in future updates for Lumia phones, as the company has promised to improve Glance even more based on customer feed back.