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Root [CDMA] [Rooting] Sprint Bloat and Removal

bigtex19

Android Enthusiast
Aug 18, 2010
313
5
Northeast Texas
ok so we all know that sprint loads this phone with a ton of crap that no one really wants. such as green hornet (that doesnt seem to be able to be removed) or spiderman 3d the game. i was wondering what all everyone has deleted on their phone and how they might have got some other things off the phone using an app from the market or something like that. precious memory is at stake!
 
not much you can do until the bootloader is unlocked. the bootloader is preventing the user from making changes to the /system partition, where this bloatware is stored.

This is part of the reason I decided not to do the perm-temp root. I need to get rid of Spiderman, which according to System Panel is always running in the background (oddly it doesn't show in settings->apps->running services but neither does anything that System Panel says is running in the background) A lot of the bloatware is running in the background & I just wanna get rid of it forever.
 
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man i was really hoping that i wouldnt have to root this thing to get rid of that stuff. is there a thread that can go over this with a bit more detail? i dont want to customize the phone at all, oddly enough i like it as is, i just want to get the useless sprint junk off of there. they load more stuff on to phone than any other carrier
 
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Better still, check this post, especially archoille's explanation of how Android deals with stuff. He's a dev. ;)
http://androidforums.com/htc-evo-3d/362038-memory-task-management.html

Once the app is loaded into memory it is highly exploitable.

Spiderman app these permissions

Edit sms or mms, read or mms, receive sms.
full internet access
modify/delete sd card contents
read phone state and identity
send sms messages
change network connectivity, change wifi sate, prevent phone from sleeping.

So all it would take is for you to visit a website that has an exploit that uses the spiderman app that is already running in memory, and they can get a hold of your sms, mms, and phone identity. If it was not already in memory, they would have to exploit something else. Why leave a door or window open that only point is to get you robbed?

Let us look at the other apps, htc watch is installed to view the green hornet. It has access to your account authenticator. Wonder what would happen if that was exploited.

So even though android has a "great" memory management. It has the worst record for security because it randomly starts apps that are being forced on that allows extreme access to system resources. Since you do not have a choice but to allow these resources, there is really nothing you can do about it.

Once some hacker figures out that forced apps are very unlikely to be updated and secured, and their for allow easy access to system resources, you will start to see attacks against them.

Once again, why leave the door or window open to your house, if you know you could get robbed?
 
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1,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, a few posts up, there is a great link to a bat file that is easily editable and you can add or delete to/from it as necessary


Yeah i know I have that on my phone also . But you can run that from your phone without a computer if you didn't know.... Put the viperbloat file from the package in /vendor/bin and then put the viperMOD_Bloat_Manager file in the root of the sdcard now once you have all of that done go to you terminal emulator and type "/vendor/bin/viperbloat" and there you go :)
 
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So even though android has a "great" memory management. It has the worst record for security because it randomly starts apps that are being forced on that allows extreme access to system resources. Since you do not have a choice but to allow these resources, there is really nothing you can do about it.

Once some hacker figures out that forced apps are very unlikely to be updated and secured, and their for allow easy access to system resources, you will start to see attacks against them.

Once again, why leave the door or window open to your house, if you know you could get robbed?

Android does not have the worst record for security - your conjecture is that someday it might.

Anyway - as you may have read in my top ten for security last year, app permission awareness is high on the list.

The issue is that with bloatware - user apps marked as system apps that really serve as carrier spam - only root can remove those vectors.

The most secure OS can be made weak by the user.

With bloatware, the carriers put us at risk and remove our control.

There's no excuse.

And HTC Watch can have its Sense account info removed or never entered and that problem can be avoided.
 
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ok so we all know that sprint loads this phone with a ton of crap that no one really wants. such as green hornet (that doesnt seem to be able to be removed)

Astro File Manager, set up to show hidden files/directories (menu, preferences, look and feel).

Goto /sdcard/.data/HtcWatch and simply remove the preload_movies folder - or - it's contents.

There are no special permissions stopping you because there can't be - even though Android supports that sort of thing, the sd card is formatted FAT32 and that inhibits anything fancy.

For your own sake (resale value, I dunno), you can even move that stuff out to a PC for offline backup before deletion.
 
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Can anyone tell me why when I temp rooted the 3d I went in and just for kicks tried to use(root uninstaller) and began deleting some of the bloatware, I noticed that the crapware they allow you to remove was listed in root uninstaller as frozen and not actually removed , of course when I rebooted the phone all the apps returned "but one" QIK did not return does anyone know why and it seems that QIK is a battery user because after that my battery life almost doubled.
 
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Can anyone tell me why when I temp rooted the 3d I went in and just for kicks tried to use(root uninstaller) and began deleting some of the bloatware, I noticed that the crapware they allow you to remove was listed in root uninstaller as frozen and not actually removed , of course when I rebooted the phone all the apps returned "but one" QIK did not return does anyone know why and it seems that QIK is a battery user because after that my battery life almost doubled.

QIK is not a system app. You don't need root to uninstall it. that's why it didn't come back.

I won't address Qik's battery-hoarding ability without some proof that Qik was indeed the cause of your battery woes. Did you monitor your battery usage? Settings > About phone > Battery > Battery use. was QIK ever listed there?
 
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QIK is not a system app. You don't need root to uninstall it. that's why it didn't come back.

I won't address Qik's battery-hoarding ability without some proof that Qik was indeed the cause of your battery woes. Did you monitor your battery usage? Settings > About phone > Battery > Battery use. was QIK ever listed there?
I thought that the QIK app was not able to be removed I dont belive there was a stock option for that , I could have been be wrong . But as far as the battery goes I didnt do any monitoring of that before hand , however I do own 4 other evo 4gs that I have played with over the last year and I did notice better battery life after removing the QIK app but also I a believer of testing things properly so I will do more research and test that .
 
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Qik was originally tagged as a system app on the 4G, so root was needed to get rid of it in my case. As Novox says, now, not so much.

I haven't tried lately - but back in the day, Qik, Fring, any of those that wanted constant network presence - if set to allow autostart on boot - could hit the point of not let the phone sleep properly in all cases. I find this true of many IM apps as well. That would lead to power waste.

Not arguing with you, novox77, just back-filling what I remember because it's possible that due to config, etc, not everyone has the mileage there - maybe.
 
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Before my earlier post, I verified that I had the option to uninstall qik under Settings > Applications > Manage Applications, proving it's not a system app this time around on the Evo 3D.

That's just my MO. I like to conduct tests before making a claim. If someone were to claim that their bad battery life appeared to be caused by a single app, I'd want to see some evidence of it. Otherwise, it's just someone trying to make a correlation with no data to back it up. Hope I don't come across as harsh; I'm just a stickler to the scientific method :)

Otherwise, we get stuff like this:
File:piratesVsTemp(en).svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

gotta love pastafarianism.
 
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That's just my MO. I like to conduct tests before making a claim. If someone were to claim that their bad battery life appeared to be caused by a single app, I'd want to see some evidence of it. Otherwise, it's just someone trying to make a correlation with no data to back it up. Hope I don't come across as harsh; I'm just a stickler to the scientific method :)

Sometimes the data are there and aren't presented initially. ;)
 
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