• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help All of My Apps Disappeared HELP PLEASE

Y

yerfdog2314

Newbie
So I was using my phone like normal, then went to play some music and the play button on the widget did nothing. So I went into the app to see if another song would play and it told me I have no music on my phone. So I restarted my phone, and when it turned back on, almost all of my apps were gone. Every app I've downloaded is gone, including some that were pre-installed. The worst part is that my Market app is gone too. The shortcuts are still on my homepage, but it isn't the right icon, and they don't take me anywhere. When I go to manage apps and look at downloaded, they're there but they come up as "com.alarmclock.xtreme.free" or "com.droidhen.defender" and not the app names. I don't wanna factory reset it just yet because I have a lot of personalized settings I don't wanna get rid of. Anyone know what to do?
 
Before you do what I suggest, see if anyone else agrees, although some of your settings may be gone anyways.

Root phone
Put bootstrapper apk on SD card (Koush's tweaked one, should be a red skull looking icon)
Boot into recovery
Go into "Backup and Restore" and select Backup
SBF phone back to stock
Go back to "Backup and Restore" and select Advanced Restore
Try restoring things such as /system, /data, and /cache.

This MAY save some of your settings that might just possibly be hidden by what ever is messed up. Worst come to worst, this wiped your phone clean and is like it just came from the factory. I feel that most hope may be gone though. DO NOT TRY THIS 'TIL SOMEONE ELSE FEELS IT MAY WORK AS WELL.
 
no one has a suggestion on this?

How about instructions on how to ROOT? what if you dont want to root? What's going on with this phone? I'm stock and posted a similar problem.
 
Well, my only other suggestion would be to check if the .apk's were in the /system/app folder...but you seem resistant to root. It can be undone with no signs of being done. I don't understand the fuss over it.
 
Because i dont believe in messing with my phone. I dont want to root i just want this hunk of crap to work.

the problem is i am not tech savvy so apk, and other techie gibberish means nothing to me. I dont have time to learn root language with everything in my life. I just want a reliable phone. Which i've yet to find.
 
This phone will be less of a "hunk of crap" if you would devote 2 hours to learning the basics of what root gives you and how you can make it better with root rights.

Anyways, with root, you can install, "flash", a new system essentially, a ROM, which allows for more customization as well as better battery life and phone speeds.

Additionally, an .apk is a general name for any app since apps have the file extension of .apk, much like Microsoft Word now uses .docx. Saying "an .apk" is like saying "a Word document", but in the Android community.

If you were to root, then install a boot strapper, an app which allows you into a custom recovery mode, you can make full back ups of the phone as well as flash ROMs, tweaks, and other improvements which Moto/VZW will never provide.
 
I am going to first say that not everyone should root their phone. You should understand every step - what it does, why it does it - well before you start, plus understand the few downsides of root (i.e., technically, it voids your warranty, though this seems to be rarely enforced; you may not be able to play DRM protected content, such as movies from the Android Market). You should understand the things that can go wrong, and the methods that can be used to reverse them. If it is available, you should know how to unroot and have those tools downloaded and available to you.

That said, getting a phone to do what it can do, but is unable to because of restrictions that cannot be changed without rooting the phone, is, to me, the one great reason to root your phone. It's why I rooted my previous phone. The fact that my current D3 is doing all that I need it to do without root is the reason why I have not rooted this phone, too.

However, if you have not even basic "DOS prompt" or terminal application competence on your computer, I think that you should either get it first or just not root.

Back to the topic at hand: it's clear that running apps from the media area is buggy. You'll either have to live with those bugs - perhaps by putting only non-critical app on the media area - or learn to live with only the apps that fit in the normal 2 GB app space of the phone and delete your least-required apps. Or, root the phone and see if it runs apps2sd more effectively.
 
With the quick unbrick methods over on XDA, you can be back to stock, unrooted, like you just got the phone from VZW, in under 5 minutes. It's nearly impossible to perma-brick this phone without doing the TBH hack, which I suggest with MUCH caution, but no VZW rep would ever be able to find that and I don't honestly believe that VZW returns look for it...as I've sent back two D3's now that have modded radios, yet they've said nothing about it.
 
I love how some of my apps disappear, the bad thing about it is if you have a lot of apps ( I don't want to say how much cause "a lot" can mean different to some) you wont notice until you see it on the market or happen to read a forum browse a site and and have that I have that app moment realizing you don't. Never had an issue with my other phones Hero, Evo, CLIQXT (had worse problems with that)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom