I know that this is old, but in case someone is running into this problem, I have a fix. However, it only works if you have root. In my particular case, I needed to use the camera from termux, which started at boot via termux-boot. So I put this into the startup script: sudo /system/bin/am start com.termux/.app.TermuxActivity For your app, you must bring it to foreground some way or another, even without user action. So if the boot started app sees 'the light of the screen' then it should work. I am not sure if you can do it from the app itself or not (without am start).