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Root Bloatware Must Die! (My noob rooting journal)

AngelArs said:
You know you can always delete it and still download it again from "My Library" if you want :)
Click to expand...

Well, I figured that wouldn't make much difference, but I did it anyway.

Then I got to looking around, since my memory was hovering around the magical 20MB mark again. When I looked at memory use with DiskUsage, I found that all the apps I'd downloaded from Amazon's Free App of the Day -- and moved to SD, and frozen -- still had massive Dalvik caches that Titanium wouldn't get rid of. Turned out that freezing them only prevented them from starting at boot. That was great, but I didn't know they were still hogging memory even while encased in carbonite.

So I sent them all to the great beyond... and now I have 45MB free. D'oh!

I'd say I can't believe I was that dumb... but now I've got enough experience being dumb to *totally* believe it. ;)
 
I only use the 'freeze' option for testing purposes. I thaw out the app and delete it once I'm certain that it won't cause any issues. I also do a backup and then store a copy of the backup just in case I need to restore the app again if it's not available.
 
RobertB-DC said:
Ok, I couldn't wait any longer to try out *something*, and it occurred to me that the next logical step was:

* Install Titanium Backup
It's a biggie, so I moved it to the SD card (at the suggestion of App 2 SD Pro, one of my favorite time-savers).

* Run Titanium Backup
Lo and behold, the Superuser program popped up! That's when I figured I should log back in to androidforums and make sure I added more info.

* Learning from Dawdling
I got to learn an interesting tidbit about Superuser: it doesn't wait forever for you to answer. Good security feature. It closed without granting SU, and Titanium told me to try again later.

* Try again
It took a while to figure out that I had to re-open Titanium and pick "Reload application" from the menu. This time, it worked! It told me to go tick the USB Debugging checkbox -- which I had done earlier, but sure enough, it wasn't ticked (probably because of reboot). Looks like there's lots of cool options to learn about, yay!

Gotta go now, will do some more after son's sports activity.
Click to expand...

Hi,

Kindly help me out please...

Thank you for the detailed information, and I am a new to android and rooting. I have LG optimus T unlocked phone.

I have installed zroot4 and selected permanent root. Phone rebooted looks good.
I have downloaded Titanium Back up and try to remove carhome2 and my nightmare started.

Phone rebooted and wifi is not working it says connecting and disconneted.

It does not recognize SD Card and no app is visible, but when I connect it to my laptop and all the apps are visible except zroot.

Your help is appreciated. What I need to do ? Is there any way I can uninstall root from laptop ? or what I should do ?

Thanks
Lboard
 
Edit - Regarding wi-fi, I deleted wi-fi network and restarted the router , it worked fine, now I still have a issue of SD card not being recognized. Thank you all again for looking into this and please help me out
Get the SD card issue fixed
completing the rooting excercise
 
I had trouble with my phone reading my SD card, and I've assumed all along that it was because it had so much bloatware starting up at boot. But I also replaced the SD card at about the same time (I think). The old card was an old card I'd had laying around, but the new one was an 8GB SDHC card. I've been wondering if the phone does better with the newer SDHC interface. If you're continuing to have SD issues, I'd suggest trying a new SDHC card. They're dirt cheap now!
 
RobertB-DC said:
I've been wondering if the phone does better with the newer SDHC interface.
Click to expand...

It depends what you're doing at the time. If you're taking pictures then a class 10 will help. But for using apps it won't matter all that much. It's basically how fast you can record to the card. The higher the card, the faster the response. I'm using a 16gig class 10 and it hasn't made much difference. But as you said the cards are cheap so why not use them? :)
 
My new favorite feature of Titanium is the recently added Batch Function list. In particular, the function to integrate all system app updates into ROM. Just today, Google updated Maps and Search, and I'd already been sitting on updates for Twitter, GO SMS, and App 2 SD (all of which are in System). I could have integrated them one by one, but this is much easier. And there's a confirmation screen that lets you check/uncheck apps to integrate, so it's perfect. Integrating those apps got me back at least 10MB.

Noob note: I don't know if I mentioned it earlier (long thread is long), but this is a huge space saver, even if you never get rid of Diner Dash 2. Turns out that when you update a "system app", the update actually goes into your Data partition. So if the old version of Diner Dash 2 was 5MB, and the new version is 6MB, you actually end up with 11MB of space being used (5MB in /System, 6MB in /Data). That also explains why you can "uninstall updates" but not the app itself -- the pre-update app is in System and "can't" (lol) be deleted.
 
robertB-DC, wow, all I can say is thanks, I followed your post word for word and my Optimus T is now bloatware free. It rooted my phone perfectly. I have never done this before, but have always wanted to use my phone my way, not tmobiles way. And reading your post gave me the courage to try it.
Now, do you know and what it is to ROM a phone. I now feel the urge to try that next. People like you is what makes forums cool, so thanks again.
 
I successfully rooted my LG Optimus T tonight by following the instructions on this thread as well as other threads I found in this forum and elsewhere.

I too was only interested in getting rid of the bloatware and freeing up phone memory. Trying to keep my internal phone memory above 20mb had become a daily chore. I have had to uninstall apps that I wanted to keep more times than I care to remember.

However, now I have a few questions. My concern is in uninstalling apps I don't want, like Diner Dash, TeleNav, etc.

This thread says to uninstall, while others say to upgrade to Titanium Pro and freeze the apps. I did uninstall the Diner Dash and Doodle Jump apps, but then got nervous and restored them from the Titanium Backup. It is interesting that the apps seemed to have been restored to the SD card, instead of back on the phone where they were.

I'm so scared I'm going to uninstall something crucial and my phone will stop working. So which is it? Uninstall, or freeze?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. also tips to free up space....in this thread when you were talking about partitions, I got lost.
 
Can you imagine *any* core function of your phone that would possibly be impacted by not having Diner Dash 2 installed? :D

It's pretty easy to figure out the low-hanging fruit and pluck it. If it's a game, you can safely delete it and not even look back. If it's a handy app that you don't use (or that wants you to pay, like TeleNav), you can blow it away and not care.

If you don't know exactly what it is, leave it alone. For example, you might not recognize something called "LG Home", so don't delete it! (It's your home screen manager: kill it and you've got yourself a $200 paperweight.)

Here's a hint: if you can download it from the Android Market, you can probably get away with deleting it. Example: all those T-Mobile specific applications. They worried me the most, because I was concerned that they might be interacting with the network in some way I needed. Turns out they didn't -- they were just another way of letting T-Mo bug me to upgrade to Caller Tunes and other stupid "features". (Caller Tunes: Subject your friends to your crappy musical tastes for just a few bucks a month!)

If you're wondering why Diner Dash 2 is now on your SD card (where it belongs): Titanium deleted it from the System partition, but restored it to the SD card because there's an additional step required to stuff it back into System.

Don't worry too much at this point about all the partition stuff, though. Just getting rid of the bloatware will make you a much happier phone owner. Come back after you've done the easy stuff, and it'll make more sense.
 
Thanks for the tips!

So far I have uninstalled Diner Dash, Pacman, TeleNav, Visual Voicemail, Doodle Jump, App Pack, and Email.

But yet, no increased space on my internal memory.

What am I doing wrong???
 
affirmwealth said:
Thanks for the tips!

So far I have uninstalled Diner Dash, Pacman, TeleNav, Visual Voicemail, Doodle Jump, App Pack, and Email.

But yet, no increased space on my internal memory.

What am I doing wrong???
Click to expand...

Clearing the Dalvik Cache will take care of a big chunk of memory that they were taking up. Unfortunately, that function of Titanium Backup comes only in the paid version. It's worth it, trust me. Paying $50 for your unlimited data plan is pretty worthless if you can't download anything, so it's $6 well spent.

Also, don't forget to install "App 2 SD", which will let you clear the (regular) cache. And upgrade that one to paid, too, so you can have the handy widget to show you how much memory you have at any time.
 
Robert, I gotta say thanks a lot man. I just went through the exact thing you made these posts about. Everything went well, your post helped out hella. :D Cleared out about 20mb and still going at it!
 
Okay next step:

Now somewhere I read that rooting your phone allows you to move apps from the internal memory to the SD card, even if the developer did not specifically allow it.

How do you do that?

Thanks in advance.
 
affirmwealth said:
Okay next step:

Now somewhere I read that rooting your phone allows you to move apps from the internal memory to the SD card, even if the developer did not specifically allow it.

How do you do that?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

That's where Titanium Backup comes in. You pick the app, and Titanium Backup moves it to the SD card, whether the developer likes it or not!

But be sure you won't give yourself unexpected headaches by moving the app. SD card memory is not guaranteed to be present, and is explicitly unmounted when you connect your phone to the PC and say "Turn on USB storage". That's part of why Widgets aren't very compatible with SD-based applications. But if you don't use an app's widget, it may be ok. I moved MLB 11 to SD, and didn't have any ill effects because I didn't use its widget.

Also, SD-based apps aren't available at bootup, so moving them to SD "breaks" activate-at-boot functionality. That may be a desirable side effect, though, on a low-end phone like the Optimus T. The more crap tries to activate on boot, the longer the boot process takes.
 
MLB...Major League Baseball??? At least that's what Google tells me.

When you say "widget" is that including shortcuts too? Or are you talking about the larger widgets, like for instance the Evernote widget that can take up to 8 spaces on the home screen?
 
affirmwealth said:
MLB...Major League Baseball??? At least that's what Google tells me.

When you say "widget" is that including shortcuts too? Or are you talking about the larger widgets, like for instance the Evernote widget that can take up to 8 spaces on the home screen?
Click to expand...

By "widgets", I mean the things that you put on your home screen by long-pressing and selecting "Widgets". The big difference between a Widget and a Shortcut is that a Shortcut is a static link to run a program, while a Widget is an active content area. The active content can be anything:
* The MLB 11 program's widget simply displays your favorite baseball team's logo, and takes you directly to their page in the app
* GO SMS shows how many unread messages you have
* App2SD has a widget showing free memory and clearable cache
* There are any number of weather and news widgets

Since widgets are actively running programs, their parent needs to be available at boot time. The SD card on our underpowered phone can take several minutes to come up, so apps on the SD card aren't available to their widgets, which could generate errors. I'm not widget-crazy, myself -- the phone doesn't have the spare processing power to run a bunch of active content -- so I haven't noticed much problem.
 
Hi, all. Thanks Matiasch and Robert B.

I'm unclear about the reference to Android version vs. kernel version and choice of rooting ap. I'm running Android v2.2 Kernel 2.6 32.9. Should I go with Robert's root software choice or the one that you referenced?

Thanks again
 
Adam in Denver said:
Hi, all. Thanks Matiasch and Robert B.

I'm unclear about the reference to Android version vs. kernel version and choice of rooting ap. I'm running Android v2.2 Kernel 2.6 32.9. Should I go with Robert's root software choice or the one that you referenced?

Thanks again
Click to expand...

Android is built on Linux, so the Android version and the Linux Kernel version are (I think) somewhat independent of each other.

It might be oversimplifying, but it's kind of like looking at your PC, where you might be running MSWord 2007 on Windows 7. If you have a Word add-on that requires MSWord 2007 or greater, the add-on probably doesn't care if Word is running on Windows 7 or Windows 8 (or whatever), as long as the Word version is compatible.

Does that help? (And to the experts: did I get anything wrong, other than the terrible faux pas of referencing Windows?)
 
just a question sorta pertinent to the OP's P.
Maps/Latitude: I have this set to NOT autostart, I Have unchecked every plausible think I can come up with that might invoke it anyway, and still it cranks off at bootup. :confused:
Uninstall via Titanium will work, but I want it to use, or I shall replace it with something from Market that I can actually control [might be the better plan].

can someone advise as to what worked for you?
 
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