Replacing a built-in Android Ap

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It is hard for most people to understand my remote location; Bonavista Newfoundland is closer to The Azores than it is to Toronto Canada.

This morning around 11 a.m. Newfoundland time my phone received yet another emergency alert; the emergency turned out to be a test. These messages have been the only emergency alerts I have received since I started using a smart phone ten years ago in Toronto, Canada.

Every so often I disable the app (Settings, Apps and notifications, Apps, Emergency alerts, Disable/Force Stop, but then Android in its Infinite Wisdom turns the darned thing back on. During an unsolicited update, I suppose.

So I think, “Why not just replace the contents of the file EmergencyAlert.exe (or eqivalent) with the contents of a tiny DoNothing.exe file?”.

At least, that’s what I have done with various versions of Windows.

Then I thought: “This ought to be possible with several other Apps on my LGK30 Android phone. “Amazon Shopping “ and “File manager” come to mind. As does “Messaging”.

Question (1) : Is this feasible for some Apps on an LGK30 Android smart phone?

Question (2) : How does one write a do-nothing Android App, basically your common or garden variety of  “Hello World!” application but without the output code. I mean, DO NOTHING

 

And in answer to some of your questions:

Answer (3) : Much as I like the USA I have no interest in receiving Presidential Alerts. Nor for that matter any communication of any sort from Justin Trudeau, or whoever is the Premier of Newfoundland or even my current local Member of Parliament.

 

Answer (3) : The only emergency I have had in the past 4 ½ years is the night that my next door neighbour’s dad inflicted $4,300 of damage to my property the Night After Halloween. While this event did bring out the town’s entire fleet of EMS vehicles (next year’s budget considerations!) and a bored RCMP constable, it did not make the local papers, because we don’t have any newspapers here.

 

Answer (3) : I am sufficiently mature to spot anything untoward and confirm my suspicions with a long-term inhabitant. Let them decide.

Thanks in advance for any constructive advice on the two questions above.

Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

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See if How To Uninstall Default (Built-In) Apps From Your Android Phone (allusefulinfo.com) or How to Remove Unwanted Pre-Installed Apps on Android Without Root (makeuseof.com) help. Please be aware of the downsides of either approach. See 5 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Android Rooting (allusefulinfo.com)

--Joe

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<h3>Reply to Joep517</h3>
5 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Android Rooting

1. Warranty Expiration

In my case I can forget about warranty; The phone was bought loclly from an agency that was associated with an insurance agency. The phone agency has gone out of business. The nearest phone agency is a 90-minute drive away and I haven’t owned a car since 2003.

I understand that I may void the warranty, but essentially warranty does not apply to me.

I do have the previous phone (shattered screen) which is still usable, so I have a backup smart phone. Swap the SIM card and I’m back in business (limping)

2. Android Bricking

See above. To my mind this is akin to what happens when I say “I don’t know what this file in C:\Windows\System32 does, but it is huge; I will delete it to free up space”.

The same risk, the same effects.

3. Irreversible Damage

See above.

4. Degrade Battery Performance

Like death, battery performance degradation comes to all of us. I think that the point here is accelerated degradation of battery performance.

I no longer am scotting around downtown Toroontoa and the GTA wheeling and dealing. I fall asleep listening to an audio book, listen to SBS Sydney podcasts in French, Spanish and Italian when I am out walking or gardening, and sometimes forget to check for voice-mails for three days.

My current lifestyle does not tie me to a phone during business hours, or indeed any time at all.

The day that the battery absolutely refuses to hold a charge, my smart phone will turn itself into a land line – tethered to the house by the power adapatre/charger. So be it.

I shall lose the abaility to take photos of the plants in my garden, but then I still have the older phone for that.

5. Inoperable Device Performance

“Android rooting may cause inoperable device performance like hanging etc.”

Inoperable performance is to my mind equivalent to “Brick”. My bottom line is that if, say, Plant-Snap or Leaf-Snap ceases to work, well then I have lost the ability to be a mobile cataloguer. I can always take a photo and use Google images.

That argument may not be true for all mobile apps. For example, if the built-in phone app starts to hang dursing a conversation, then I have essentially turned my phone into a brick.

6. (MY added point) I do not know enough about Android apps/OS to be sure that fudging an app today will not cause corruption when Android decides it is time for an update to the OS. Maybe the update detects that “EmergencyAlert.exe” is fudged and replaces it with the newer version 1.2.3.4.567879. And since Android updates occure more frequently than Emergency Alerts (I’m guessing), my risky fudge will be obliterated before the next Emergency Alert test comes along.

Summary: I think that my question here is “Am I so desperate to remove a built-in app that I don’t mind losing the phone (as if I had dropped it into the Atlantic ocean)?

The answer to that has to be “NO”. As Cijan has pointed out, it seems like a lot of trouble to remove a twice-yealy test of Emergency Alerts. And I cannot put up an argument for “freeing up space” with 6.6/8.2 GB in use.

How to Remove Unwanted Pre-Installed Apps on Android Without Root

Disable Pre-Installed Apps: This I have done already for a slew of apps whose services I do not need. Since disabling is done through the O/S there should be no harm in doing this (Settings, Apps and notifications, Apps, Emergency alerts, Disable/Force Stop)

How to Remove Bloatware From Android: This is my line.

FWIW I did the build-number trick and was rewarded with a message:

“Congratulations you are now a developer”. I exited Settings and restarted the phone. I am still a developer. This remonds me of the ad in Playboy “As soon as you learned how to make babies, you needed to learn how not to. If all else fails I shall backup my contact list and reset the phone.

How To Uninstall Default (Built-In) Apps From Your Android Phone

By the time I had worked my back up the stack to this article I was convinced that I should NOT messa around with the business of faking appps on my smartphone. Anyway,, I read on:-

“remove default or pre-installed Android apps on just a single tap”  I no l.onger believe this “just a single tap” business. I stopped believing it when, some thirty years ago, I began hearing “just a single click”; it is, as you will see if you watch a classroom of students, several wrist and arm movements to get the mouse cursor to the spot, and then a click.

“EXA System App Remover is one of the best Android apps I found recently that claims that it can uninstall the system’s built-in apps from your Android smartphone. You should give it a try as it is free to download and use.”

Let me see now: it is said to be one of the best, it claims, I should give it a try. I get the feeling that the author of the article hasn’t actually used the app. So why should I?

“This app also claims for uninstalling default or built-in Android apps from your phone. This application helps you to freeze pre-installed applications on your phone.” Sane deal: claims; helps. And “freeze” is a new term to me.

“System App Remover is also one of the best … Some of the latest Android versions don’t support this app. But what’s the loss in an attempt? You can try if it works on your Android smartphone or not.”

I have covered “what’s the loss” in the first section of this post. The loss can be as catastrophic as joep517 pointed out, and which I now believe.

 

Thanks, Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

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Seems like a lot of bother trying to remove or monkey with your Android OS in terms of the Emergency Alert System. Can’t speak to annoyances from other Android apps that you want to remove permanently from your LG phone.

Here is a site specific to Canadian Emergency Alerts:
https://www.alertready.ca&#8230; and yes, it is the official one, as found from the Gov of Canada public safety site.

This FAQ suggests you can’t opt out, but you could put the phone on silent mode on the test dates/times, which are really only a couple of times a year:
https://support.alertready.ca/hc/en-us/articles/4405946016019-Can-I-opt-out-of-receiving-alerts-

Here’s the test schedule with dates/times for each province:
https://www.alertready.ca/testing-schedule/

Not sure why you’d be getting USA alerts. I’m probably closer to a USA border than you and I’ve never gotten any! Maybe that needs to be addressed by your service provider/carrier?

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<h3>Reply to cijan</h3>
cijan >>  Seems like a lot of bother trying to remove or monkey with your Android OS in terms of the Emergency Alert System. Can’t speak to annoyances from other Android apps that you want to remove permanently from your LG phone.

I agree. I am convinced. I have no real annoyance” from Amazon Shopping and the other 50% of the apps in the screen, just that I occasionally tap on one when I don’t mean to and have then to back out of there. That. And the space the things take up.

My thinking was “If getting rid of Emergency Alerts is as simple as replacing one executable file with a much smaller one, then why not take advantage of the opportunity to free up a lot more space.

 

cijan >>  Here is a site specific to Canadian Emergency Alerts:
https://www.alertready.ca&#8230; and yes, it is the official one, as found from the Gov of Canada public safety site.

The #8230 is bad for me, but the raw link https://www.alertready.ca/ works fine. The survey link leads to “The survey is currently under maintenance. Please come back later”.  The “click here” leads to “COMING SOON Public Survey” from which I gather that it is now too late to take part in the most recent survey.

No matter, I am interested in a simple mechanism for removing a specific App and following the surveys would not help me in that goal.

 

cijan >>  Can I opt out of receiving alerts? “Therefore, it is not possible to opt out of receiving the alerts”.

Understood.

“wireless public alerting is geo-targeted and can be very specific to a limited area of coverage” This caught my interest. Twenty years ago a colleague suggested I write a (Windows application) that based on a Canadian postal code (e.g. M5S 1X5) would scan daily police reports and target emails according to their criteria. M5X 1X5 would put you at Bloor & Brunswick, while pruned back to “M” would give you all of Metro Toronto.

 

cijan >>  but you could put the phone on silent mode on the test dates/times

True, but then I found myself doing the extra work to turn down the sound for that period, and then extra work to see if I missed any phone calls; or having to interrupt my podcast listening. And yes, I know it was only twice a year (for now), but my initial thrust as a simple way to just get rid of the thing with something as simple as a FileCopy.

And yes, I have spent enough time reading this stuff and replying (grin) to last me until I turn 237 years old!

 

cijan >>  Here’s the test schedule with dates/times for each province:

Thanks for this. I see that we are done for the year. Presumably sometime in December Canada will issue the calendar for next year.

I note that for 2023 so far Newfoundland and Labrador have issued “3 civil emergency and 1 AMBER alert;”. I imagine that these must have been in The Big Smoke (St John’s population 111,000)

I have spent a bit of time trying to imagine an emergency alert for Bonavista (population 3,500). If the scheme water was poisoned I’d be little affected since I harvest rainwater for consumption. A conflagration? No high-rises buildings here; wooden-framed houses, but each on an individual lot and of concern only if it is an adjacent neighbour. An amber alert for a vehicle I can understand, but since it is a 90-minUte drive to the highway, it’s the sort of place where two cop cars can effectively stretch a net right across the peninsula.

 

Thanks, Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

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Sorry Chris, I think the link got gibbled when I switched between ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ in the reply box, and I didn’t notice! It was supposed to just be to the home page for that site. I too would have been interested in a survey :)!

Sounds like you did get some useful info from the site, even just to see the schedule for testing, and yes they will update that once they know what 2024’s sched will be.

In terms of usefulness… you never know!  We had it go off when we were driving through the prairies and there was a thunderstorm with funnel clouds and hail, so we were able to detour to avoid it.

 

 

 

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cijan>>> *Sorry Chris, I think the link got gibbled …

Now I have to go buy a whole turkey instead of just the thighs so that I  can complain that “my giblets are gibbled”. Cute word. Thanks!

 

cijan>>> *In terms of usefulness… you never know!

I can understand the utility for people who are car-mobile; I have driven at least twice in every mainland state of the USA, and emergency alerts might have been useful then, but I was always just bopping along, so even the bush-fire in Idaho was fun, because I got to chat with a park ranger (?) for a while, which made MY day more interesting. As the time was not quite ten o’clock, I was probably the first Western Australian HE had seen that day (grin).

 

My situation now is that not only do I rarely leave Bonavista, but I rarely leave my house-lot – there is so much to do in 1/6 of an acre! After 1,753 days here I have made the trip to Clarenville (90 minutes) but three times, one of them under protest.

Especially I think that emergency and amber alerts make much more sense in settled areas of Canada and the USA. If you were ever wanted by the police, the last place you should hide is Bonavista at the tip of the peninsula. And if a Tornado comes, where-ya-gunna-run-to?

 

I now see that providing it stays at twice a year, it’s not worth the risk of gibbling (hooray!) my phone.

Thanks again, Chris

 

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Conclusion: There is no simple way to replace an Android app with a dummy executable and fool the o/s.

Detailed responses below,

Thanks, Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

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