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Help Apps shortcuts disappear from home when power off

A

allacar59

Lurker
I have had my Epic for 10 days now and have swapped it once for this problem. If I power off the phone to save battery life or change battery, when I power up again the app and contact shortcuts I had placed on the home/extended pages have disappeared (the widgets are still there). The apps and data are still there in the apps folder, but it is a pain having to pull my most commonly used ones back to the home pages each time I restart the phone.

Sprint tech have remotely rebooted the phones and we have taken both phones back to factory settings several times but the problem always recurs. As I have now had 2 phones with the same problem I am presuming it is a software glitch.

Sprint have been less than helpful to date, other than basic resets and changing the phone.

Has anyone else had this issue; if so is there a fix?
 
What apps do you have installed? Only thing I can think of is that it's an app causing the problem if it's not the phone.
 
Good call. Other than preloaded apps I have:

Advanced Task Killer
Astrid Tasks
BBC News
Pandora
Quick Settings
The Weather Channel

Would it be worth doing a factory reset and loading these apps one at a time to see if one of them causes the problem?
 
It's worth a shot.

It might be worth trying NOT loading any apps and seeing if the problem continues. If it does, it may be a bad batch of phones.

Does it occur each time you powercycle the phone or just some of the time?
 
Kelmar

Have reset the phone to factory settings, downloaded no apps, switched the phone off and all the factory loaded app shortcuts disappeared apart from the voicemail. The google, buddies and social network widgets stayed. So it is not an app causing it. I have lost the ESPN and CNN shortcuts altogether as they don't appear in the app list.

I despair of Sprint, because if it is a bad batch of phones all they are doing is replacing bad with bad.
 
Are the apps that are disappearing installed/moved to the SD Card? I've heard issues where it can't load them if the SD Card hasn't finished initializing yet so you hit a weird race condition.
 
I'm having the EXACT same issue. I just swapped the phone this afternoon and to my dismay had the same thing happened when I got home.

I noticed that its happened both times after I accepted a prompt to update the software on my phone. Upon resetting after the update, I get the message, "your software is already up to date" and my App shortcuts are gone and from then on dissappear everytime that I restart the phone!

I'm going to try to factory reset again, but not sure if it will do away the update the phone installed.

Its bizarre because my wife's Epic hasn't had any issues whatsoever, and I love the phone otherwise.

Anyone have any ideas?
 
I have 3 android phone, Nexus 1, LG P500 and Samsung Galaxy Tab, only Tab and LG have this problem and never happen in Nexus 1, can anyone help on how to stop it!! It have 2 situations, 1 is the apps only disappear from the desktop but the apps still in the phone, the other is apps really disappear ....
 
Hi there

I finally got to the bottom of my issue at the Sprint store here in Tampa where I am vacationing (nice folks).

Basically it was my gmail account that was causing the issue. We factory reset the phone, created a new gmail account and then set my old gmail to fwd to the new one and presto, were all set and my apps no longer disappear at reboot and my old email still works for anyone that needs to reach me.

Hope this is helpful!
 
I have had not just one...not even two...but three Samsung Epics with this problem. I bought it at Radio Shack, and then returned it after a couple of weeks. The reason I waited so long was because I was out of town for the holidays and didn't have the box that it came in. BEfore I left the store with phone number two, I turned it off and back on again...no icons. Unfortunately, they didn't have another phone to give me, so I went to another Radio Shack a few days later and got a third phone. The same thing happened, only this time, it didn't happen until the next morning. We tried it out in the store and I had no issues. The next day I ran the battery down, and when I charged it and powered it back on...no shortcuts.

I did notice a similar experince that others reported, meaning that it only applied to shortcuts for programs/apps and not with the widgets built into the phone. Any of the Samsung/Android widgets would stay, but programs such as mail, gallery, calculator, etc would disappear from the screen once the phone is powered off. Another thing of note: if you put folders on the homescreen, they will stay, but any program/apps that you place in them will go away when you power off the phone. Lastly, the wallpaper remains unchanged, regardless of what happens to the shortcuts.

I went by three Radio Shack stores, and they said that they had never heard of that problem. I also went to two Best Buy stores, and they said that they had never heard of that problem either. I called Sprint, and they couldn't find a solution for the problem. They suggested I visit a Sprint repair center. A sales person there had a Epic, and she stated that she had no issues with hers. I even watched as she turned hers on/off without issues.

I really like this phone, and to be honest, the problem that I'm having is really just a nuisance more than anything else. I've read a dozen complaints on numerous forums about this issue, and the only solution seems to just be "get a new phone". I did see that one person above claimed that they changed their google account and have no issues now. Maybe I'll try that. Are there any more suggestions out there? IS this something that the new Android OS will fix?
 
drag0n77JBP said:
I did see that one person above claimed that they changed their google account and have no issues now. Maybe I'll try that. Are there any more suggestions out there? IS this something that the new Android OS will fix?
Click to expand...

It will fix the phone. There was nothing wrong with the ones you returned, just your Android account getting corrupted.

I went through the same thing you did and sat with the Sprint techs while they id'd the issue by process of elimination.

Key is you need to factory reset the phone and then set up a new account. Then just set your existing gmail acct to forward to the new one and your set.
 
Thanks...Yesterday I changed my google account from a googlemail.com to a gmail.com account. I did the factory reset, and then added the gmail.com to my accounts section. I haven't had a problem since then. I tried that before and reused the googlemail.com account, and it still didn't work. All is well now though.

I thought it might have something to do with my acount after I got the third phone, and this is why.....When I got the phone and activated it in the store, all was working as it should. We turned the phone on/off without problems. After I got home, I realized that she hadn't added a google account to use to sync my email/contacts. I added it, and thought nothing of it. The next day I let my battery run out and had to charge and power the phone back up. All my icons were gone. I was not happy in the slightest. I racked my brain trying to figure out what I had done differently. The only thing that I could figure was that it happened after I added my google account into the phone. At that point, I accepted my fate and decided that I'd just live with it. IT wasn't until yesterday when I logged into my email that I had the thought, "why not try to use a gmail account". Lastly, and I haven't seen this myself, but one of the guys at Best Buy did some research and said that he found information stating that the problem was a known one and it would be fixed in the next firmware update. The only information I found close to that talked about addressing issues with apps/prgrams stored on the SD card vice the phone memory. People have reported that some of those icons disappear from the home screen, but that's due to the fact that the homescreen boots up/loads before the SD card is scanned and ready.
 
drag0n77JBP said:
Thanks...Yesterday I changed my google account from a googlemail.com to a gmail.com account. I did the factory reset, and then added the gmail.com to my accounts section. I haven't had a problem since then. I tried that before and reused the googlemail.com account, and it still didn't work. All is well now though.

I thought it might have something to do with my acount after I got the third phone, and this is why.....When I got the phone and activated it in the store, all was working as it should. We turned the phone on/off without problems. After I got home, I realized that she hadn't added a google account to use to sync my email/contacts. I added it, and thought nothing of it. The next day I let my battery run out and had to charge and power the phone back up. All my icons were gone. I was not happy in the slightest. I racked my brain trying to figure out what I had done differently. The only thing that I could figure was that it happened after I added my google account into the phone. At that point, I accepted my fate and decided that I'd just live with it. IT wasn't until yesterday when I logged into my email that I had the thought, "why not try to use a gmail account". Lastly, and I haven't seen this myself, but one of the guys at Best Buy did some research and said that he found information stating that the problem was a known one and it would be fixed in the next firmware update. The only information I found close to that talked about addressing issues with apps/prgrams stored on the SD card vice the phone memory. People have reported that some of those icons disappear from the home screen, but that's due to the fact that the homescreen boots up/loads before the SD card is scanned and ready.
Click to expand...

Exactly as you explain it, I did a test. I remove my SD card from my Samsung Galaxy that was having that kind of shorcut problem with two apps.
Those apps disapeared from the phone because they where installed on the SD card without me knowing it... I reinstalled the apps without the SD card et then these two shorcut stopped disapearing. So, I can confirm that there is a problem with shorcut with apps installed on an SD card in some case.

Have a nice day!
 
I have had this happen on three different phones now... The EVO 3D, Nexus S and now the Droid Charge... Why are we provided the option to install on SD card if it doesn't like that?

I am so confused.. Please help. I really want to be able to run the programs from the SD card.. And it's happening on different devices and factory installed SD Cards...

The shortcuts stop working after restart or shutdown... and its very annoying :-(
 
running htc inspire w/android 2.3.7 and cyanogen 7.1.0 DesireHD

...have Go Locker with Go Launcher EX loaded.

The Data Enabler and or any other widget added to Home screen through a long press on screen, then selecting 'Widget', would automatically be removed from my Home screen after rebooting or shuting down the phone and restarting it.

The main culprit I found was that if I moved my GO Launcher EX to my SD card, the widget shortcut would always disappear.:mad:

Once I moved GO Launcher EX back to my phone from my SD card, the widget shortcut remained present on my home screen. :rolleyes:

I tried several versions of uninstalling and re-installing the GO Launcher EX to test this and it worked the same everytime. :eek:

Apparently, the GO Launcher EX needs to be local to the phone as it is dealing with the base phone functionality and reads the phone information first after rebooting or restarting, ...then the application informationfrom the SD card.

Since the GO Launcher EX was on the SD card, the app tries to load it from the phone first (not finding it, the loader throws an error to the widget shortcut as " had problem loading widget" where the widget should have appeared) and then continues loading the rest of the cell phone setup.

Perhps the app developers could throw an exception handler in the event that delays the widget short to load until after the content from the SD Card is loaded, then allow the widget to load from the SD Card rather than the phone memory.

:cool:
 
I've had this problem since using Titanium Backup to backup my apps.Phone was fine before.Widgets stay but shortcuts dont.:confused:
Also Auto Airplane Mode does not autoload when phone is booting.It did beforehand.Galaxy S2.

Just come up when I downloaded and installed Titanium Backup.



Easy Uninstaller(process mobi.infolife.uninstaller)has stopped unexpectedly.Please try again
^^^^^^
This error message

Still working on a fix.

Latest....Seems to be ok...Uninstalled app that was crashing and moved all apps with which shortcuts were disappearing to phone.All seems ok now.Also auto airplane mode program works on boot up since i moved it to phone.Uninstalled google+
 
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