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Help with Google app please!

tacotory

Lurker
Jan 23, 2011
3
0
Hello.

I am struggling to figure out how to get the Google app to quit updating. Here is the backstory...

A few months ago after an update, my voice-to-text performance went way down. First off, the quality/ accuracy if it's translations of my speech when WAY down. To make matters worse, the feature where a word that the system was unsure of would be underlined and have some possible alternative translations were offered, went away. Visually, the old voice button was a teal green, and the new one was blue.

After a bunch of searching, I finally determined that this was all due to an update to the main Google app. I went to the app in under settings> apps and via the three dots in the upper right-hand corner was able to uninstall updates. This completely fixed the issue.

The next day, the new update was active again. I went to the Play Store and disabled the auto updates, and it is still happening. I uninstall the update and everything is great and the next day, or later the same day, the update has been installed again. All I can figure is that the update file is saved on the phone memory and the app is accessing it to update itself.

Soooo, is there any way to find and delete this update file off my phone? Or some other trick to keep it from updating by itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
This is only one thing about Google that I strongly dislike.

There are many more.

The most simple and effective way of dealing with this is to disable the Google Play Store app.

This will prevent unwanted updates.

In order to download apps, just use alternative appstores.

Some of them get their apps right from the Play Store anyway, so the only thing you will be missing is the aggrevation.

Personally, there are four that I use.
All of them have apps of their own that you can download and use like the Play Store, and also are available on websites through your browser.

https://www.apkmirror.com/

https://m.apkpure.com/

https://en.uptodown.com/

https://f-droid.org/

These are all well known appstores.

F-Droid has the distinction of never having malware (Google Play Store has TONS of malware- regardless what they tell us).

I have never had a bad experience with any of these four.

On devices that have some extra space, the apps of the appstores give some nice features, but the websites work well enough for devices that are pinched for room.
 
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This is only one thing about Google that I strongly dislike.

There are many more.

The most simple and effective way of dealing with this is to disable the Google Play Store app.

This will prevent unwanted updates.

In order to download apps, just use alternative appstores.

Some of them get their apps right from the Play Store anyway, so the only thing you will be missing is the aggrevation.

Personally, there are four that I use.
All of them have apps of their own that you can download and use like the Play Store, and also are available on websites through your browser.

https://www.apkmirror.com/

https://m.apkpure.com/

https://en.uptodown.com/

https://f-droid.org/

These are all well known appstores.

F-Droid has the distinction of never having malware (Google Play Store has TONS of malware- regardless what they tell us).

I have never had a bad experience with any of these four.

On devices that have some extra space, the apps of the appstores give some nice features, but the websites work well enough for devices that are pinched for room.


Thank you. I may have to try this. I cleared system cache and the app cache and it came back again. Question, if I disable the Play Store will and move to one of your recommendations, will I need to delete apps previously downloaded from PS to be able to update them through F-Droid or other?
 
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An important aspect you need to seriously consider is if you do opt to disable the Play Store app, at that point you take on the responsibility of keeping your apps up to date. If you have only a handful of apps, this will be a daunting task but manageable, but if you have a couple dozen or more apps then it's a matter where you need to manually update each app when an update/upgrade is released. That involves you either checking the Play Store site and viewing each app you have running on your device on a regular basis (every couple of days as different apps each get individually updated by their developer), or checking each app's site (many do not have their own web site as a lot of developers just rely upon the Play Store site for their exposure to their user base.
It won't be an immediate, all at once matter but a gradual and very sporadic issue where occasionally an app will have issues functioning properly. This pertains more for apps that require frequent online access (i.e. a social media app or a weather widget), as opposed to apps that just run locally (i.e. a file manager app). And it's not an absolute -- an old email app will continue to be functional for quite a while (given POP/IMAP and SMTP are very long-standing protocols themselves) So it's not a significant short-term issue, but the longer you intentionally run out-of-date apps it's something you will need to address as time goes by.

Oh, and if your device is running Android 11, this recent announcement from Google on dropping APKs is going to shake things up a bit. It's still early days for this news so hang on for a wild ride, there will surely be legacy exclusions to be established once the dust settles.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557390/google-apk-app-bundles-package-format-play-store
 
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An important aspect you need to seriously consider is if you do opt to disable the Play Store app, at that point you take on the responsibility of keeping your apps up to date. If you have only a handful of apps, this will be a daunting task but manageable, but if you have a couple dozen or more apps then it's a matter where you need to manually update each app when an update/upgrade is released. That involves you either checking the Play Store site and viewing each app you have running on your device on a regular basis (every couple of days as different apps each get individually updated by their developer), or checking each app's site (many do not have their own web site as a lot of developers just rely upon the Play Store site for their exposure to their user base.
It won't be an immediate, all at once matter but a gradual and very sporadic issue where occasionally an app will have issues functioning properly. This pertains more for apps that require frequent online access (i.e. a social media app or a weather widget), as opposed to apps that just run locally (i.e. a file manager app). And it's not an absolute -- an old email app will continue to be functional for quite a while (given POP/IMAP and SMTP are very long-standing protocols themselves) So it's not a significant short-term issue, but the longer you intentionally run out-of-date apps it's something you will need to address as time goes by.

Oh, and if your device is running Android 11, this recent announcement from Google on dropping APKs is going to shake things up a bit. It's still early days for this news so hang on for a wild ride, there will surely be legacy exclusions to be established once the dust settles.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557390/google-apk-app-bundles-package-format-play-store

Thank you for the response. I'm sure that would have been an issue, but as soon as I disabled PS the real issue showed its ugly head. Calendar stopped working, youtube stopped working, Keep stopped working, Family Link (app used to control the kids' devices) stopped working, etc, etc.
 
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Did you disable Google Play Services, or Google Play Store?

These are two diffdrent things altogether.

As for some of your questions, any app that you have from PS should be able to be updated by UpToDown, ApkPure, and ApkMirror.

As @svim noted, this would be done manually by you on ApkMirror and if you did it on the websites for UpToDown and ApkPure.
But, the apps for UpToDown and ApkPure offer the ability to notify you of available updates, and so you would know in this case and then open the app(s).
Other features include the options of updates automatically being downloaded, and then you choose when to install.

F-Droid can do these things as well.
Also, F-Droid does have a few of the same apps that are on Google Play.
But, because of certain things, you would be much better off to uninstall the PS versions and then install the FhDroid versions in place.of them.
This gives the F-Droid app the ability to do those features as the others.

Now, I asked in the beginning about what app you disabled.
I have never had any app quit working because I disabled the PS.
I have, however, had multiple apps (Youtube, G-Mail, etc.) quit working when I disabled Google Play Services.

Be sure that when you enable Google Play Services, you disable Google Play Store.
Services has a puzzle piece as an icon, while Store has a colorful arrow pointing right.

On a side note, the 'loss' of Youtube is actually a blessing in disguise.
Allow me to introduce you to NewPipe.
Youtube, without the ads, tracking, and other BS- plus the ability to play in the background, pop up player, and downloading capability.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
 
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Well re-reading through your initial posting, perhaps the Google app itself isn't so much the actual problem but it's just a secondary conflict to the text-to-speech function. (One is just a system-level, added app, the other an integrated part of the installed Android operating system on your device) Have you tried just going into your Settings menu and resetting the Speech-to-Text options?
https://speaking.email/FAQ/87/android-system-settings-for-speech-and-voice-recognition
 
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