Important Notice: Rooted and Removing stock apps

[jimmydafish]

Hello my name is P3Droid,

We (TBH) have a lot of experience in Motorola phones and hacking. This experience dates back to the Razr days.

Here is a word of caution. Do no delete apps from the System partition, I would suggest you only rename them to .bak. When Motorola pushes updates each of the files undergoes a hash check, if the file has been manipulated or is missing the entire update will fail.

Until a system only sbf or similar is released, unless you make a back up with bootstrap and recovery, you will eliminate your ability to take updates moving forward.

 

[thunderpack]

You can remove many of the stock apps without rooting just by using the built in app manager.

 

[jimmydafish]

Those apps are in /data it is the apps that are in /system that count.

 

[franciscojavierleon]

Hello my name is P3Droid,

We (TBH) has a lot of experience in Motorola phones and hacking. The experience dates back to the Razr days.

Here is a word of caution. Do no delete apps from the System partition, I would suggest you only rename them to .bak. When Motorola pushes updates each of the files undergoes a hash check, if the file has been manipulated or is missing the entire update will fail.

Until a system only sbf or similar is released, unless you make a back up with bootstrap and recovery, you will eliminate your ability to take updates moving forward.

i take it that all the apps you can delete through app manager are on /data therefore are safe to delete right?

 

[BlackOtaku]

This should definitely be sticky'd.

 

[jimmydafish]

i take it that all the apps you can delete through app manager are on /data therefore are safe to delete right?

Yes anything that you can delete through the application manager is okay to remove, those have no impact on the update process.

And to complete my thought above. When an update is released, and they are coming, then you need to just change the file names back to normal to take the update.

 

[jug6ernaut]

Sound to me like we ned an ap that lets toys select programs to rename and then can change then back when needed. Would make it alot easier. Ill look onto this...also if some one else can confirm this info I might stick it.

Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

 

[cellzealot]

I can confirm that what p3droid is saying is true for all recent Motorola devices, but the point is really that you won't know until an OTA update is released how they have written the updater script in the zip file.

We have been through this with releases for every phone since the Droid X and many people got caught out by it and were stuck until we released SBF files that could safely restore the stock configuration and allow updating to official release versions.

This brings up another important point about modding your phone at this stage in the cycle. Without a full SBF to recover with in the event of a problem that renders the phone unbootable or unable to access recovery, or if you haven't made a complete nandroid, you will be again be stuck and have to return your phone to AT&T/Motorola for warranty replacement. This is never good for anyone.

When we mod our phones against the wishes of the carriers and manufacturers, we should really take responsibility for those actions and not produce a mountain of bricked phones whose cost is passed along to everyone in the form of higher ETFs for smartphones and other ways.

So, until a full SBF is released of the current build, people should be very careful what they change or remove from their phone's system and/or NVM and radio.

I also tried to warn users about this in another thread that was locked before p3droid started this thread. We have watched hundreds or even thousands of users destroy their phones in myriad ways and helped many of them recover them by providing SBF files as a safety net. It's not fun and if it can be avoided it is to everyone's benefit to do so and only requires care and forethought.

 

[jug6ernaut]

Is there anyway we could make a backup of this partition for later use? would each user need to make one or would one for all users suffice?

 

[cellzealot]

Assuming a bootstrapped custom recovery is possible, and we know Koush is already working on it, then a nandroid backup of at least the system, userdata and cache partitions would be the first and best step to take. Also assuming that the bootloader is locked/signed and true recovery is not possible, then the boot image and kernel will not be able to be backed up or written to by the bootstrapped recovery. It is always best to make your own backup for your device and store it on the sdcard where you have easy access, but users have also been able to use someone else's nandroid backup to restore their device in many cases as well. The recovery will give you the option to restore each partition separately in the advanced options so that you won't be restoring someone else's data to your phone.

We at TBH have also been able to create our own update.zip files and SBF files to help users recover from various mishaps.
This was because we had access to both official and unofficial files and tools to accomplish those things.
We have no idea if that will be the case here and we will not likely have the device ourselves to work with given we are VZW users primarily.

Again, there are many variables here that are yet to be determined and modes of access to the various partitions and radio baseband will be different with this phone as opposed to previous Qualcomm chipset devices.

All of this means that at this stage extreme caution is advised and being overzealous with root access is very dangerous right now.

 

[acPIZZA]

I suggest everyone that is rooted use TITANIUM BACKUP to deal with their bloatware issues. The pro version, which you will need, is only a few bucks and is worth it. TB allows you to 'freeze' bloatware apps, which to my knowledge just blocks it fro the system, but does not delete it. The apps you choose to freeze are also removed from the app tray - so no more clutter. This way when an update rolls around, you can run down the list and simply touch 'thaw' to bring those apps back to recognition. This seems like a much more efficient and easy way to go back and forth, rather than renaming the .apk's.

I apologize if someone already mentioned TB in this thread - I just skimmed quickly.

 

[LGSilva]

I deleted all the bloat apps using the app manager without root. They were gone!

I did a factory reset on the phone and *surprise* the apps were back!

 

[pwndrone]

The things that were not part of the system come back during reset. On the other hand, im ****** because I went crazy and deleted some actual apps that the system will check. Yay me.

 

[Battleship]

The things that were not part of the system come back during reset. On the other hand, im ****** because I went crazy and deleted some actual apps that the system will check. Yay me.

Ouch. Might not work, but have you tried a hard reset?

We should make a list of what's safe to remove like we did for the Captivate. Might be helpful.

 

[pwndrone]

I did a full factory reset and those apps that weren't part of the system came back but stuff like the help center are still missing.

Hopefully there will be a way to load the stock firmware sometime in the future.

Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

 

[beetlejelly]

Would an app like "Autostarts" work in this case?

 

[acPIZZA]

Guys, I can't emphasize this enough: use Titanium Backup to freeze the apps rather than deleting them, it will make your life much easier.

 

[d.cortez]

does this apply to using different font files as well? I'd like to use a ttf font that's a little larger than DroidSans. if i rename and use a different font will that impact OTA updates or anything else for that matter? thanks!

 

[rjayflo]

before reading about "freezing" apps, i reset my atrix back to factory settings. i need help rooting my atrix again. it keeps me in "Waiting for Device" where before i had no problem rooting. and another thing, when i had reset back to factory settings...i still have superuser installed. do i uninstall superuser in order to gain root access again?

 

[snlu178]

I have not rooted yet. My question is can we use freeze to turn off BlurAccounts or is it fully baked into the Rom?