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Uninstalling Apps - Best Practice

photek1000

Newbie
May 14, 2010
49
3
I have had my Desire no for almost 2 months, and like most I have tried installing and uninstalling many apps, to see what I like.

Due to doing a factory reset on my phone yesterday I have layered back all the apps I was using and have noticed that I have used considerably less memory than before, making me very suspicious of the uninstall method used within the market place.

Does it leave behind pieces of the app, and if so what's the cleanest method of uninstalling apps.
 
What are you comparing to? Apps have cache and data that can grow as you use them. Are you comparing your device without a given app before install and after uninstall? Or are you comparing space available with the apps installed before and after reset? It can certainly make a difference in the comparison.
 
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Cache could amount to some, but the figures I'm looking at are 132mb used prior to Factory reset, and 67mb used post reset and apps reloaded.

I'm happy that I have so much space back, but was just wondering if there are little bits of apps left behind after an uninstall.

There have been threads about this issue in the forum and the only phone appearing in those posts was the Desire. You might want to look for them and see if any solution was found - I really doubt there is a solution to this bug though.
 
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justwondering if there are little bits of apps left behind after an uninstall.
That would really surprise me. These things are so encapsulated, it'd be hard to leave stuff behind, other that perhaps a little group of preferences in a shared system file, but even that would be pretty light weight. :cool:

I mean, think about it, phones are a type of embedded devices; you (meaning the Android creators) can't expect a device to only allow, say, 500 app installs total over its entire lifetime. :eek: These things really need to "behave" in the sense that embedded systems do.
 
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The OP is right. Android doesn't always uninstall applications properly. You could fill up your memory by installing applications then deleting them.

I have checked the amount of free space before installing apps, after installing and trying them, then after deleting them and many times not all the memory is recovered.

I think I read in another thread that this is supposed to be fixed in 2.2.
 
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I've recently had the same problem, I've had my Desire for about 3 months & have installed & un-installed many apps over that time. Having come from a G1, I'm no stranger to clearing the cache on my apps.

Just before I did a factory data reset, I had 42 apps installed, with only 21Mb free in device storage (after clearing caches on all apps). After the FDR I reinstalled all the apps which I had synced with Appbrain and was amazed to see that I still had 79Mb free in device storage! I know that some of that will be due to data storage for the apps, but a difference of 58Mb seems like there is definitely something awry there.

I've been testing a Froyo rom on my G1 and will be very grateful for apps to sd when it hits my Desire in Sept, even if it doesn't move *all* of the app to SD.
 
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The Froyo apps2sd method is pretty terrible, though, and depends on the app's dev to allow moving to external storage. For some reason, a lot of devs are special snowflakes who think their apps--even though they aren't widgets or home replacement--need to go into internal storage and attempts to move to sdcard are taboo. Custom ROMs can circumvent this, but you're probably SOL if you're running stock.
 
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