I have just purchased an X10mini pro and have been playing around with it today. I was wondering if apps are always installed on the card, or are they sometimes installed on the phones memory? How do I change the default location of where apps are installed?
From what I gather Linux based distros are different in that they don't have a registry etc. When an app is run is it purely from the .apk location or are different files from the app copied to different locations when the app is installed?
They're pretty much universally installed to the phones memory though some software will install additional data to sd. It's an unfortunate limitation of Android 1.6, if an when we get 2.2 this'll change. On a rooted phone there should be ways around this but I haven't looked into it personally.
Ok thanks for clearing that up. I have now rooted my phone and see that the default location for apps is /system/app/. Does everything to do with the program just reside there (like a portable app) or are program libraries etc copied to other locations within the phone? For things like email programs where do they store the individual emails?
/system/app/ contains all the "system" applications (i.e. the stuff that's pre-installed on the phone) - you can't usually change these, unless you've got root access
/data/ is the user writeable section of the phone's memory - /data/app/ is where the stuff you install goes, along with the data any running apps save (unless they're specifically programmed to save stuff to the sd card instead)
So the email program at /system/app/ Email.apk where does that store it's emails? Does it store the emails in /data/ or somewhere else? What about browser cache, where is that stored?
Does anyone know where I can download a guide on file structure to try and understand what exactly does what?
Related
Hi,
I have a strange problem with my sgt 10.1.
I'm not rooted, do not have TW. Yesterday I installed connectbot, and deinstalled it after using it.
Now, almost all my apps crash (browser, music, etc). Looking through the traces it says it cannot write into readonly database, or cannot create a database. I figured it was a space issue (which is not indicated by Android) and tried to delete some stuff.
I cannot delete anything anymore. From ES File explorer (Androis app), I cannot delete any files from my sd card, and when mounted to my laptop, I cannot delete things either.
Restarting does not help, and brings back the problem in 3 minutes.
So, what is going on here?
Like the title says why are apps allowed to read the contents of files on the SD card without asking permission? Apps have to ask to read SMS, Calendar, and everything else. It seems like a huge security hole to me. Thoughts?
Anybody? No thoughts or reasons at all?
I believe that there's nothing secure that can be read from the SD card without explicit permissions. You need WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS to read secure settings... all your calendar data and so forth are either outside the handset or stored securely... etc.
However, I'm not an Android developer --
SD card functions as a storage device. So writing files on it should not require permissions. Only access to certain files/apps have to require permissions.
Have you tried fixing permissions? Don't know if it will work but its worth a try I guess.
To me it just seems like a security risk but then I guess Windows software allows the same thing and nothing can stop from reading contents of the hard drive. Still seems unsecure though that any platform, mobile or non-mobile would allow this behavior.
Hi
I will be passing on my company phone for someone else to use for couple of weeks, and I am having some privacy concerns about it. I have already transferred all images/videos from the phone's ext SD card, but now I am worried of how I can securely erase the data. I don't wanna buy a new SD card just for this, so I was wondering if there is any way to safely erase/destroy those data.
For starters, I got my self 'secure file deletion' from play store, which allows to wipe off selected data off the phone memory and the external card. Which I did. Images/videos are stored under:
/storage/extSdCard/DCIM/Camera
But after wiping those off, I realised that not all image/video data is cleaned off. The OS also stores thumbnails for those media. Surprisingly, those are stored in phone memory and location can't be changed:
/storage/sdcard0/DCIM/.thumbnails
In there, there are .JPGs (thumbnails) and a strange '.thumbdataXXXX' file. So, I use 'secure file deletion' to remove those as well. Funny thing is that even after erasing those, I can still see the thumbnails of the corresponding video/image (but when I select it, it says 'file not found' - which is expected, because its already been wiped). Nevertheless, my guess is that the thumbnails of those videos/images are also cached elsewhere. But where?
My question is - is that all there is to it? Is the OS storing any more related data in regard to images/videos that I need to wipe? Are those actions I have taken enough to give me peace of mind that my media are safely wiped off beyond recovery?
I found that the secure deletion apps are very few, most of them require root and most even don't work properly (e.g. files reappearing after wipe etc). There are some good ones like 'ishredder 3 pro' and 'clean master' that offer secure wipe options - but only for wiping off entire phone/card memory - which is not what I want here. Any more suggestions?
The phone is a non-rooted Samsung with 4.1.2 Android OS on it. I don't wanna root the phone and I don't want to wipe entire ext card - so any suggestions, please bear that in mind.
Makes me wondering why there isn't any build-in function to the OS for secure deletion of files? Sure it would be slower and not everyone would applaud it, but it could be enabled on demand e.g. via Developer Options...
ta!
I have also noticed, that ever since I started using 'secure file deletion', when I connect via USB to copy files from the extSD to the PC, I get "device not connected" errors every few files I copy. Then, I have to use 'enable usb debugging' (from Dev Options) in order to get the device to show up again.
Any thoughts on my initial queries will be most appreciated. Someone must have noticed those issues. Perhaps they are not specific to 4.1.2 but maybe other versions of the OS...
jstoner said:
Funny thing is that even after erasing those, I can still see the thumbnails of the corresponding video/image (but when I select it, it says 'file not found' - which is expected, because its already been wiped)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just another observation regarding this. If I go into File Manager and nagivate to "/storage/extSdCard/DCIM/Camera" and then go back to Gallery, then the thumbs of videos that are already deleted don't show up. That's a workaround for refreshing the cache (without having to do a full restart).
Anyone noticed those issues, or is it just me???
I clicked "encrypt", then I left it to work. But it must have done something else while I was away.
When I returned to it, it had a new standard installation, un-encrypted, un-rooted.
It asked me for a Google account and other first time setups, then it synced with a 4 day backup that must have been downloaded from my Google account, which installed all the apps that I had before, but none of their user data.
Because in the past I lacked enough free space on the internal disk, I must have moved app settings to the sdcard. Maybe this is why they weren't saved and restored automatically?
My main issue is that I lost all my Google Authenticator tokens, and on the sdcard I can't find this directory: /Android/data/com.google.android.apps.authenticator
I also tried installing on my Windows all kind of undelete tools for smartphones, but most of them fail to even see the internal storage when I connect the Z2 through USB. The one that worked great for the sdcard didn't find the directory that I was looking for.
Please help. What the hell happened? Do I have any chance of recovering my Google Authenticator tokens?
Hello,
I have a new phone with Android Oreo, and a SD Card containing a lot of images and music. I am facing the following problems:
1.) On the music folder, there exists album art, so I created a file called .nopics in Order to exclude this folder from being scanned. However, the image files in the different subfolders are still visible in apps like Whatsapp. How can I clear the image cache, or force all media to be rescanned? I think the com.android.providers.media system app exists no more. How is this done in Oreo?
2.) Some files on my SD card get the wrong date, not the file date, but obviously the internal (EXIF?) Date is suddenly set to the year 2038, leading to old files appearing as new in apps like Telegram or Whatsapp. The Google photos app is not affected, but all old-fashioned image pickers now show the wrong order. Any idea what may cause this, and how to fix?
Why no answer? Google should be smart enough to implement this by default now, the rescan apps on market don't work, android is such a garbage jail. gnu OS pls