Help Please - Android Home Screen Lost and OS Different

[bhpwnergay]

Hello new friends,

I am an inexperienced android device user. I own a Samsung galaxy S3 through Sprint. This evening while my son, 4.5 years old, was playing some standard games on my phone the home screen (and for lack of a more precise description the os interface) drastically changed. He claims to have been playing angry birds space, however he was playing one of the many Intellijoy apps for preschool development. I did notice the app kept freezing, the app was 'Kids Profession Dressing Game', however the audio would keep playing. My son kept complaining about not be able to turn the audio off. I think i had lock then unlock my phone several times to fix the audio/app crash problem.

That is the build up to my main concern/need for help. At some point in the evening my son managed to completely change the 'os interface' on the phone. I checked all my pics/music/videos/apps and everything is installed, however it is as if the system recently updated. My homes creen was void of the personalized placement of apps/widgets and a few new apps were on the home screen instead. They were called 'free rpg', etc, silly spam apps tht come with shady ad based apps. In addition to losing the personalization of apps and widgets, the planes that hold the apps/widgets has changed too. I replaced all the apps and widgets on the homescreen but when i restart my phone the widgets disappear.

I am Confused as to what my son couldve done that i can't figure out.how to undo. I have had android.updates before none of which have cleared the homescreen and then placed new spam apps on the homescreen. Any advice on this matter is welcomed. I am not completely at a loss thankfully all my apps still work and data is still.there. It is just strange to have it working fine one minute then having a 4 year old reinvent your android system

Note: he has been playing the phone since i got it around 6 months ago. He plays angry birds, snes kirby, mupen64 mario64, pokemon, and recently these intellijoy games. The intellijoy game i mentioned earlier is new to my phone, freshly downloaded earlier in the day. There have been no problems like this before. The one instance something similar has happened is when i was running the 'knock off mupen' 64 emulator and it would automagically create these spam advertisement home screen short cuts very similar to those that appeared tonight. One of the main reasons i uninstalled it, then celebrated the return of the mupen 64 emulator. All politics aside, i would love an explanation, if at all possible from the information i have provided.

Arejay

 

[Digital Controller]

Welcome Arejay, to the AF community

Let me see if i can try and assist you today!

First off it sounds like this app is a little shady and could be putting some malware and spam on your device, have you tried uninstalling this, "Kids Professional Dressing Game", and seeing what happens after that?

Otherwise you may have to just keep deleting your recent apps to see what is happening...

Lastly, if all else fails you might just have to perform a factory reset which will delete all of your saved data.

Hope this helps, feel free to elaborate more on the situation!

 

[bhpwnergay]

Welcome Arejay, to the AF community

Let me see if i can try and assist you today!

First off it sounds like this app is a little shady and could be putting some malware and spam on your device, have you tried uninstalling this, "Kids Professional Dressing Game", and seeing what happens after that?

Otherwise you may have to just keep deleting your recent apps to see what is happening...

Lastly, if all else fails you might just have to perform a factory reset which will delete all of your saved data.

Hope this helps, feel free to elaborate more on the situation!

Thank you for the prompt reply. I am going to post some screen shots and try to explain the situation a bit better. I am aware that I can probably perform factory reset and fix the problem, however I am curious if there is another solution.

I have a screen shot (from the phone) of my home screen before and after the change. Please see the attached PDF. The following text is from the PDF:

"The picture of the home screen on the left is how my home screen was laid out prior to the change that happened a few days ago. The home screen layout after the change is shown on the right. Each main change is enclosed in a red box and labeled with a number, the numbers are meant to show similar UI structures. The Google search bar in the right image is not a widget, in fact, I cant remove it from any of the home screen planes. The enclosed box-1 shows the different planes you have for your home screen (im sure you know this) this changed from 7 dots to a uniform bar. The bar still identifies which planes you're in, etc. The applications home screen button was replaced by the circle with the squares in it. In fact the entire feel and layout of the Android OS has changed. Now applications lag, notifications won't show up, etc.

What I am curious about is if there is another way to restore my original functionality other than a factory reset? \\

Side Note: I did not just happen to have a screen shot of my old home screen chillin', rather when my alarm went off at 9:47 am my phone reverted back to my old android os look and feel with the apps in their original places. This just made me even more bazonkerz. I habitually lock and unlock my phone, call it ocd if you'd like, but once I locked-then-unlocked my phone the new os look and feel was back. So I tried to trick the phone, I set one of my two old alarms to go off in the afternoon to see if it would revert back to my old one again. This afternoon when the alarm went off nothing changed, no old os look and feel, just this crappy new laggy layout. This prompted my suspicion that maybe there is a setting change that could be to blame. Once again, I am not very experienced with Android OS and the various ways of manipulating them and personalizing them."


Thank you again for your help. I have yet to try to uninstall the app. I think I was a bit hasty to blame the app. Honestly, I don't know what to blame. I backed up everything I wanted to keep that was on the phone, so my next step is most likely factory reset.


arejay