What does this do? And why would I want to do it?
I am trying to figure out my silent bug issue. I have read some people doing a factory wipe (which I always do when installing a ROM) and not having the problem ever again. I figure I would see what this Fix apk thing means and does before I do it.
Found, in recovery under other.
Thanks.
Probably it's unlikely to have any bearing on your "silent bug" problem.
But, you asked, so I will tell you. It's a little subtle, but not too bad.
[ BTW, I haven't personally verified all of this - there is some speculation going on by me, but I think it's pretty good speculation
]
Under all versions of Unix & Linux since the early 70's, when you "logged on" to your account, all of your personal files were owned by a single user, or UID for short. Similarly, when you would run programs, they would have your UID, and thus have the correct privileges to read, write, or destroy files owned by you (having the same UID). Other users of the system would have different UIDs, and each user could set permissions on their files that would either allow or deny other users from reading, writing or deleting those files.
So, the basic idea there was to "protect Users from each other". (There is a similar mechanism for groups of users called a GID, but we'll skip over that for now)
Android is a little bit different, however. Instead, the idea is to "protect applications from each other". What this means is that when you install a new application, that application gets a unique UID. And so, when it reads or write files into it's own private data area, they are automatically "safe" from mischievous behavior of other applications - even though there might only be one "user" of the phone - you! So, the "User Identity" in Unix/Linux has been hijacked a bit in Android; but that's OK, because usually there's only one user of the phone anyway - and many applications.
Now normally Android just takes care of all of this automatically the first time it boots up, after a factory reset, or when you add or drop applications to/from the phone from the marketplace, and you don't need to pay any attention to it.
Now, let's suppose that two users decide to use Astro as a file manager. One of them installs it as the second market app they download, and the other installs it as the twentieth. Both phones will work just fine for both users ....
but the private data stores for the same application will be owned by different "UIDs" on the two phones.
Clearly that's not a problem. But what happens if somehow the "data stores" were swapped between two phones? All of a sudden, Astro would be unable to access it's own files on both phones!
Now, you're probably thinking, "What? How would that ever happen?". And you would be right; it won't.
But something similar can happen - if you use A2SD (or APPS2SD) and multiple ROMs. Because you are now
potentially sharing the same applications (on the SD card), if you add or delete applications from the SD card in one ROM, you haven't made the corresponding changes with the other ROMs for which you have backups - that is, you added or deleted an app without Android knowing about it (for those backed-up ROMs).
Here's where it gets a little fuzzy for me - apparently in the housekeeping that Android does during every boot cycle, it becomes possible for files in /data/data to end up "owned" by the wrong application.... so the "Fix apk UIDs" menu entry can (somehow magically) rectify this while Android is offline by figuring out which apps are supposed to own which data areas, etc.
In any event, it is something similar to that. It is unlikely to have any relevance at all on a ROM that has never used A2SD, or never "shared" the SD card via A2SD with another ROM - where the other ROM did app installs & deletes of apps on the SD card.
eu1
Now that I have speculated about it in such great detail, I better go and figure out what it really does. I'll update this post if I am substantially in error.
[ Edit ] Yep, that's pretty much what it does. Source code can be found either on your phone (in recovery boot) or at the
Cyanogen/packetlss github.
