Sunday, January 2, 2011

Unneeded Android Apps

Android is a phone OS. That much is clear if you own an Android Tablet. There's tons of phone-related stuff still on it. Worse yet the standby cell service is a notorious battery drainer (even if there is no cell radio present - don't ask me how that works). Here's how I got rid of it on my Haipad M701-R over ADB:

adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
adb shell mv /system/app/Phone.apk /system/app/Phone.OLD
adb shell mv /system/app/TelephonyProvider.apk /system/app/TelephonyProvider.OLD
adb reboot


Since my tablet came from China it has home market apps on it of no use to me. Some uninstall normally, others won't and need to be force removed. Here's how I got rid of EOE Market:

./adb remount busybox
./adb shell
rm /system/app/eoemarket.apk
cd /system/bin
sh pm uninstall com.eoeandroid.market
sync
exit
./adb reboot


Google Maps also has an issue that it won't update because the preinstalled version is locked down. A similar set of commands extricates it so I could install a newer version that will update properly:

adb remount busybox
rm /system/app/Maps.apk
cd /system/bin
sh pm uninstall com.google.android.apps.maps
sync
exit
adb reboot


A word of warning, though, that there is always a possibility you could "brick" your tablet doing this and these commands are specific to my tablet - and all worked - but that is no guarantee they will work on yours. You should list the contents of the the folders first to make sure yours doesn't have a slightly different file name and also not all Android devices use the same naming convention for the mtdblock partitions.

Lastly, I have one app that shows up in the list when I filter by "all" in Settings>Manage Applications that I don't know what it is because the name is in a foreign language:


1 comment:

OffWorld Girl said...

Someone finally told me what the mystery app is:

"Google Pinyin IME"

It comes standard with Android.