ANT Forum

I now have tested the selfloops dongle and the Suunto Movestick. Both work for heart rate (with Garmin ANT+ HRM strap), cadence and power (with Power2Max power meter). The downside is that you have a cable dangling off your phone and you can no longer use an external battery plugged into the micro USB port.

So there are a variety of workarounds for Samsung's lack of support arranged here in order of cost:

1) Wait for Samsung to actually include the ANT+ HAL services in the next upgrade as promised. (growl)

2) If you just need HR, buy a bluetooth HR strap. There are several ranging from $20 to $60.

3) Buy the Suunto Movestick $20 from
su dot factoryoutletstore dot com/details/0-55913/suunto-move-stick-mini.html (or just go to suunto dot com and search for "movestick")
PLUS an OTG cable available from Amazon $2 - $9
TOTAL: $22 TO $29

4) Buy the selfloops dongle and OTG cable $60!

See my previous post for services to install for 3) and 4).

5) Buy a new phone. The S6 is on sale now from Sprint.

Good luck! I'd like to know what folks end up doing.      

I saw an update to the ANT+ Radio Service and ANT+ Plugin Service. I haven't had a chance to test yet, but I will do so once I know if they help. ::fingers crossed::      

Yeah, I've got those too, ANT Radio Service 4.14.0 and ANT+ Plugins 3.6.0. Still no Hardware Abstraction Layer though, so I won't hold my breath.

I just did a quick test with my ANT+ HRM strap. Nada.      

My last failed test on my S4 was on September 22nd. At that point I gave up and bought an S6 after confirming that it supported ANT+ with the current build. I can personally confirm that the S6 works without the need for a dongle.

I just turned on my old phone (S4) and let it update since I still have data service. After many software updates, the firmware will not update for some reason. According to ANT Checker, the built in ANT service is not working and the HAL Service is not present. There may be a firmware update available but I cannot get it downloaded. I will keep trying for the next several days.

Here's my hypothesis: Samsung made a decision during the development of Lollipop to temporarily skip implementation of the ANT+ service on older phones to conserve resources for other projects. Rather than redirect those resources to finish the ANT+ implementation on the S4, they are abandoning the effort with the expectation that S4 owners who used ANT+ will just upgrade their phones. It's now been almost 5 months since they broke ANT+ on our phones. I'd be very surprised if they completed the implementation after all this time. This all gives me a very negative outlook towards Samsung. They have great products, but their customer support is aggressively disrespectful.
     

Yes, they specifically told me it was being fixed too, "very soon". They told me that in July, and several more times in August and September. It'll soon be 5 months, so I'd be very interested in what you find out.      

ShaneG - 12 March 2015 09:20 AM

Notice to everyone who has a Samsung Galaxy S4, model GT-I9506:

We have become aware of an issue with a recent Android 5.0.1 OTA update going out to some regions of this S4 model that breaks ANT support. After upgrading to the new firmware version, the ANT HAL Service will be missing from the applications list and ANT functionality will not work.

Samsung is aware of the issue and is currently working on releasing an update to fix ANT support, it was not an intentional change.

We have confirmed that this affects the build LRX22C.I9506XXUDOA6. If you believe you are affected by this issue you can and the "Build Number" displayed on the Settings->General->About Device screen does not match this value, please respond here or to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to get further support.

My build number does not match up the above... Mind is LRX22C.L720VPUGOH1      

Mine does not work.... How do I fix this??      

Well, that means that Samsung has said they are fixing this in March, 8 months ago. My build was L720VPUGOD2 but I have abandoned that phone. I needed one with working ANT+. If you're willing to go the dongle route, see my post above.      

I just checked, my current version is L720VPUGOH1. That was from an update just before I abandoned the phone. It did not and does not have the ANT Hal Service. I can no longer update firmware on that phone but that would be a different version, right?      

That is correct, my software version is L720VPUGOH1.... The baseband is the same.      

And the ANT Hal doesn't show up..