Removing useless pre-installed apps

2-1-2016 | Self

[Don@VB]

I am trying to remove useless apps from my Galaxie 5s... problem is getting past factory authorization in order to edit and remove unwanted apps.

[Don@VB]

Appreciate all the input. Seems to overwhelmingly against rooting.

[piroque]

Thanks for the help

[Paal Gulli]

I have an Android phone (KitKat 4.4) that I rooted using Towelroot. And I’m using Link2SD to move apps from internal storage to the external SD card to effectively give me more internal storage.

I created two 8-gb partitions on a 16-gb mini-SD card, one partition formatted in FAT32 for general storage (same as Android’s original external storage directory) and formatted the other in EXT4 as the “extension” to internal memory. EXT3 probably also would work, but there is no drawback to using EXT4. Then I used the Link2SD app to move apps from internal storage to the external EXT4 partition, effectively increasing my internal storage.

The trick is, the Android OS does not automatically know it’s supposed to mount that extra EXT4 partition on the external SD card. Which means that when the OS loads, there’s nothing telling it that this new partition exists, or to use it.

The new partition must be “mounted” before the OS (and Link2SD) can use it. There are two ways to do this. If your phone is rooted, you can mount it manually from a terminal window, or create and run a shell script to run the necessary commands (also via terminal window). But you would have to do that every time you reboot the phone, which obviously would be a nuisance. The way to have it done automatically for you each time the phone boots, and the way you would do it in a ‘real’ UNIX/Linux OS, is simply to add the proper configuration items to a start-up script located in the “/etc/init.d” directory. These “init.d” scripts serve more or less the same function as configuration items that were done done in past Windows OSes through the “autoexec.bat” file.

As root user you will be able to make these edits to the scripts in “/etc/init.d”, but the added complication is that Android does not by default read them. By default Android is not “init.d-aware”. To work around this, you have to install a 3rd-party boot image that _IS_ “init.d”-aware. I used a “modded” 3rd-party boot image created by someone called “daishi4u.” I’m also using his recovery image, something my el-cheapo LG phone lacked from the factory. From the factory it was unable to boot into safe mode, but adding his recovery image fixed that.

This probably sounds dauntingly complex but it isn’t so much if you break it down into the individual tasks. I can give more detail if you interested (but it isn’t worth my time if you aren’t). I knew all the UNIX/Linux specific stuff before I got involved in this, but I probably would have gotten frustrated in the effort and given up if I hadn’t had the help of the gang at AndroidArea51.com. It’s a small-ish forum by Android standards, but they are a genial lot, and eager to help, and there are some genuine Android heavyweights there. That’s where I came across username Daishi4u and his modded kernels. You also can find the source for those boot images through that forum. “init.d”-awareness is just one of the many enhanced capabilities his boot images provide.

In broad strkes, the steps are:
1. Prepare the new SD card
2. Root the phone
3. Flash with an init.d-aware boot image (I used daishi4u’s)
4. Create the init.d script to auto-mount the new external EXT4 partition at boot-up

I can give you the contents of my functioning init.d script, but the syntax probably will require some minor tweaking to account for differences in directory names on your phone. After creating the init.d script, you shoud be able to reboot the phone and confirm the external EXT4 partition was automatically mounted.

5. Install Link2SD and move whatever apps it will allow you to move to the external storage

Link2SD does not move the entire app, only parts of it, and some apps it cannot move at all, but it moves enough of them that I don’t seem to be able to exhaust the internal storage capacity. Don’t forget that if you also create a larger FAT32 partition on the external SD card, you also have more space for storing personal files, movies and music and such. And card ‘speed’ matters to performance whenever Link2SD has to access the external SD card, so IMHO it is money well-spent to get a card that is both larger and faster than you think you will need. Wikipedia has a page titled “Secure Digital” that can plus you up on SD card performance ratings.

[Hermes37]

If you have an /etc/fstab file you can add a line for the partition to that file and it will be automounted(or not, your choice) along with the other default file system mounts.

Most Linux distro’s do it this way.
Android is just gaggles name for their Linux distro.

[Paal Gulli]

Android has no /etc/fstab. No ‘fstab’ and no ‘mtab’ anywhere. No rc?.d directories either. It’s missing quite a few of the pieces parts that I associate with *NIX.

The file structure is much modified and much ‘streamlined’ from what you see in a typical desktop UNIX/Linux distro. I largely find it an indecipherable web of intertwined symlinks and emulated files, directories and partitions. Which I did not grasp the complexity of until I read the documentation to the Link2SD app.

Which is why I didn’t just create a symlink and move all internal storage to the SD card in the first place. After reading the Link2SD documentation, I was certain that that would have broken a ton of dependencies. After installing Link2SD, I discovered that that was a providential move, because even Link2SD can’t move any portion of some apps to the external storage. So there’s no telling what damage I might have caused trying to relocate an entire partition. But Link2SD does an admirable job.

And I misspoke earlier. /etc is really a symlink to /system/etc. So the correct path should have been /system/etc/init.d.

Also, one step I forgot to mention in my previous post. I wouldn’t exactly call root user in Andriod “god-mode,” and even “demi-god mode” is sometimes a stretch. Android’s root user cannot modify or control a great many files or write to quite a few directories. Or change the permissions on those files and directories. And the external SD card is not writeable by default, even to the root user (only to the OS). But ‘root’ can modify the SD card’s properties manually to enable writing to anyone, even to regular users by editing the text file
/system/etc/Permissions/platform.xml

There are 3rd-party apps that will edit the ‘platform.xml’ for you without ‘rooting’ the phone, but if you’re going to use Link2SD to move parts of apps to the external SD card, at some point you’re going to have to get your hands dirty from command line anyway. And this is as good a cause as any. I usually go ‘old school’ and edit text files using ‘vi’, mostly because there are so many files that root cannot control. And when you bump into one of those unexpectedly, it’s easier and faster to make that determination from command line than from some file management app.