Database Users

Removing Bloatware

Due to the fact that I can't directly reply to the thread that was created because I don't have enough posts, I'm posting here looking for an answer.
I followed the advice in this post. The only difference is that I used Super Manager instead of Root Explorer to delete the files from /system/app/.
Here is the odd part, after finishing I rebooted and when I powered back up and checked my available memory, it didn't change at all. Naturally I went back in with Super Manager and checked for the files and they are not there. I also looked with Astro File Manager and the files were not in /system/app/. I don't understand that if I deleted the files, why didn't my available memory increase? That is the whole reason I removed.
Thanks,

Why do you need more space in system folder?...
Go in data folder and check dalvick and data folders for leftovers.
Sent from my S7 using Tapatalk

Removing the so-called "bloatware" won't free up app storage space.
The tablet uses different partitions to store different things. System applications are stored on a different partition than user-installed apps. They each have their own space, indepentantly of each other.

When I started this exercise in removing the "bloatware" from my S7, I had a little over 85 MB free from the 175 MB available. After removing the "bloatware" I didn't see a change. Over the weekend, I removed the battery from my S7 to check the version number. After starting the S7 again, I check the memory and I now have 101 MB free. The only change was to remove the "bloatware". After installing two more apps on the tablet and moving the .apk file to my Link2SD partition on the internal SD card, I now have 98.97 MB of available space.
For the other post about removing the cache, I just ran cachemate and now I have 105 MB of available space.
Removing the "bloatware" does have an effect on the available memory.
While I did restart my S7 after removing the "bloatware", I didn't remove the battery. I don't know what I had the difference, but by completely removing the battery I saw that I had more space available after removing the "bloatware".

Couldn't have been. All of the apps you deleted reside in /system/app. That's on a completely separate partition from /data.
/data is where apps you install from Market go. It's also the space listed under "Internal Tablet Storage".
/system is where the system core files (and any pre-bundled apps) reside. There is no way to see the space free/used without going into a root terminal and running "df -h"
There is no way deleting system applications freed any sort of space on your /data partition.
It would be like if you had two hard drives in your computer, labled C:\ and D:\. Why would deleting files from C:\ free space on D:\? It's the same concept.

Ok. I understand what you are saying. However, I'm just reporting what I see when I look under:
Internal Tablet Storage
Total Space = 175 MB
Available Space = 100 MB
After removing the .apk "bloatware" files from /system/apps the available space increased.

tedkitch said:
Ok. I understand what you are saying. However, I'm just reporting what I see when I look under:
Internal Tablet Storage
Total Space = 175 MB
Available Space = 100 MB
After removing the .apk "bloatware" files from /system/apps the available space increased.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
he's just being hostile and doesn't understand...
the bloatware resides in /system... now some of those files are Maps.apk which is an outdated version, and when you update it to the newest version from the market it installs to /data...
now...
it says it is updated, but we still have the outdated version which is still in /system taking up INTERNAL space. removing that apk from within /system and rebooting will add that much more space to your internal and the maps will still be installed because they are updated and installed to /data.
if you want to be so high and mighty, think before you talk.

also... data is installed internally, hence why we have the a2sd or links2sd method.

joenilan said:
it says it is updated, but we still have the outdated version which is still in /system taking up INTERNAL space. removing that apk from within /system and rebooting will add that much more space to your internal and the maps will still be installed because they are updated and installed to /data.
if you want to be so high and mighty, think before you talk.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you need to think before you talk.
Space on /system is not (normally) accessible to the user to use for storage of any kind. It's reserved solely for the OS' system files to be stored.
I think this is where you all are getting confused. Yes, the entire storage (including the internal storage) is all on the same flash ROM chip. But, it's not all contiguous space. It's broken up into partitions, and changes you make to a single partition does not affect any of the other partitions.
I'm not TRYING to be hostile, and I understand more than you think I do. I understand the underlying Android OS' mounts, whereas it seems you do not.
If you had said "removing these apps keeps them from running and using up CPU cycles and ram" I wouldn't have an issue with it. But, saying they free up space for the user to install apps to is just plain wrong.

[Q] CM9/CM7 Out of space, but computer showing 27GB available

Hello all,
I have CM9 nightly installed on a 32GB microSD and I have just run into a weird problem. I still have 27GB left open BUT when I try to download magazines and install apps, it's saying I'm out of room or running out of room. Anyone have any idea why that might be?
Is it possible it's installing things to the EMMC? If so, how do I change that?
Sorry if this a n00b question. Thanks in advance for your help.

mikelav456 said:
Hello all,
I have CM9 nightly installed on a 32GB microSD and I have just run into a weird problem. I still have 27GB left open BUT when I try to download magazines and install apps, it's saying I'm out of room or running out of room. Anyone have any idea why that might be?
Is it possible it's installing things to the EMMC? If so, how do I change that?
Sorry if this a n00b question. Thanks in advance for your help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android has 3 major areas where stuff is stored. The system partition holds all the OS stuff plus has an area for system apps. The data partition is were downloaded apps get stored normally. The media or sdcard area is normally used for music, videos, pictures and also where some apps store any working data.
The system and data areas are of relatively fixed sizes even though they are all on the actual SD card. For your 32GB SD card it is probably "460M system, 975M data, rest is FAT for sdcard" from veryGreen post.
So your error message is being triggered probably because the 975M data partition is full. Typically this enough to hold about 150 - 200 apps depending on their size, but some games can take quite a lot.
You can check memory usage by going into settings and looking under apps.
What can you do about it? On an SD card install the simplest way is to use ANdroids capability to move apps from the standard data partition to the sdcard partition. Not all apps can be moved but many can and this will then free up space in your data partition.
Get the Apps2Sd app to help you manage this process.

I haven't run from a sdcard in quitevawhile, buy it sounds like the card didn't get repartitioned after making it into a bootable. After you burn an image to a card, you need to use an application like Easus, a disk partitioning tool (free for home use for windows, I believe) t repartition the card and make use if the remaining space.

mateorod said:
I haven't run from a sdcard in quitevawhile, buy it sounds like the card didn't get repartitioned after making it into a bootable. After you burn an image to a card, you need to use an application like Easus, a disk partitioning tool (free for home use for windows, I believe) t repartition the card and make use if the remaining space.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think the partitioning must have worked otherwise it wouldn't function at all.
You could change data partition size to give more space to the data partition if you are careful. I've done that on emmc prior to install. I've never tried it on an SD card after install and it's possible it might muck something else up. However, the basic point is that apps and related content go into data by default. The big part of the SD card left over from the initial install is intended for media.
Compare it to a phone. The data partition in the internal phone memory is fixed and can run out of space if lots of apps are installed. If you plug an SD expansion card into a phone it allows you to store lots music, video, etc but unless you move apps to the SD card then your original data space is unchanged. That's why app users can complain if a memory hungry app can't be moved to SD.

Maybe you can teach me something here. I am not sure I understand.
When I formatted an 8 gig card to run cm7.1, I was able to use it to boot but had the rest of memory unavailable for use. It wasn't until I redid the process and then reformatted the partitions to have the remaining space available. Only then was I able to use the remaining 6 gigabyte or whatever. I had the four partitions in both instances, and the card worked, it just wasn't available because all the space was allocated to the wrong partition. Which I rectified with Easus, I'm pretty sure.
What I guess I am saying, isbthat there are some tools that could be used, although I maybe wrong. It just seems counter-intuitive that the OP should have to use App2SD and otherworkarounds when theybhave 32 gigs to play with. I think Easus lets you define those partitions anyway you like, with the 29 gigs or so that is left once you allocate the system stuff.
Like I sad, I maybe just don't understand this very well, it is something I did when I was first learning about rooting, before I figured there was no real reason not to go internal.

mateorod said:
Maybe you can teach me something here. I am not sure I understand.
When I formatted an 8 gig card to run cm7.1, I was able to use it to boot but had the rest of memory unavailable for use. It wasn't until I redid the process and then reformatted the partitions to have the remaining space available. Only then was I able to use the remaining 6 gigabyte or whatever. I had the four partitions in both instances, and the card worked, it just wasn't available because all the space was allocated to the wrong partition. Which I rectified with Easus, I'm pretty sure.
What I guess I am saying, isbthat there are some tools that could be used, although I maybe wrong. It just seems counter-intuitive that the OP should have to use App2SD and otherworkarounds when theybhave 32 gigs to play with. I think Easus lets you define those partitions anyway you like, with the 29 gigs or so that is left once you allocate the system stuff.
Like I sad, I maybe just don't understand this very well, it is something I did when I was first learning about rooting, before I figured there was no real reason not to go internal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The various partitions have different purposes. It's not that they are unavailable for use. You want each area to have sufficient room for what you want but not necessarily too big because that then is wasted and is subtracting from the other areas.
First there is the boot partition containing the boot images. This can be small.
Next you have the system partition (~500MB) which can be fairly small because the OS does not take a lot of room and the system apps are relatively fixed in size and you don't need to add extra to that.
Next you have the data partition where downloaded apps and some of their associated data lives. You want this to be fairly big to accommodate a decent number of apps but it doesn't need to be huge. Apps vary in size from 100s of Kbytes up to say 20MB or more. So a 1GB data partition can typically hold about 200 apps.
On an SD card that then leaves the rest of space for a sdcard partition where media can be stored like video, pictures and music plus some apps will also require some working space on there.
So on an SD card install the main balance is between data and sdcard. If you were to make the data partition larger to accommodate more downloaded apps then you reduce the amount of space for music, video etc. But you do want enough space to hold a decent number of apps. The standard verygreen SD card installer sets the balance at ~1GB data and the rest sdcard for media. Now if you never wanted to put much media files on the SD card and you want to be able to download thousands of apps then that would be an argument for setting the balance the other way.
Now if you install to the internal memory the same scenario applies but you have an additional partition confusingly called emmc. Your boot, system and data areas are on the internal memory. The left over internal area is the emmc partition and the sd card is now normally set up to be a single sdcard partition.
Both the emmc and the sd card are typically used to hold media files.
The size of the data and emmc partition in the internal memory can be varied before you do the install by some partitoning zip tools and there is a thread dedicated to that.
By default as supplied new Nooks have a 5GB internal data partition and a 1GB emmc. Many people think that is not a great choice as it is really difficult to run out of app space with 5GB and it means there is only 1GB internal space for media and the unused data space is wasted. By repartitoning to say 2GB data and 4GB emmc then you get plenty of space for apps and release space for more media.
You are right that using something like Apps2Sd would seem unnecessary when you have lots of free space. It is effectively a work-around to let you use some of the sdcard as extra data area if you run out of the data area that has been allocated. Actually on an SD card install there is not much of a downside in that moving an app from data to sdcard as it is still all on the same SD card. For an internal memory install it is nice to have a big enough data partiton to make moving apps to the SD card unnecessary.

[Q] Nook Color only shows 800mb of free space in Apps

I have a Nook Color that was deregistered. I never registered it and followed these instructions to boot to CWM, and I then installed the latest Encore CM9 and the CM9 GApps.
When I go into Apps, it shows that there's only around 700mb free.
I installed DiskUsage and it shows /mnt/emmc, /mnt/sdcard, /rom, and [Root required]. /mnt/emmc I'm guessing is the NC's internal memory - it's 5.1gb and full of B&N stuff, Good Housekeeping, etc. I tested by using a manga reader application to see where it downloads by default, and sure enough it saved to the SD card by default.
I'm guessing the rooting directions excluded something or I may have a different version of a NC than I thought. Is there any proper set of instructions I should follow? I just burned the 2gb image to a 2gb microSD card from here, but would that be the root cause of the issue - use a 2gb microSD, only have 2gb available? In any case, I've got that image burned and CWM set up per the same thread's instructions. Do I need to do anything else? Is there some kind of partition tool I have to use, kind of like diskpart on a Windows boot CD to delete and mount partitions on the NC before continuing?

You have everything right. With the older Nook Colors they came with 1000MB set aside for app storage and 5000MB for media storage. Usually the 1000 MB is plenty for apps. You have used about 300MB so far storing installed apps and settings for your system apps leaving you with 700MB left. That is a lot. Apps do not take much room. Media is where you eat up storage, pictures, movies, books, etc.
The CWM card you used does not effect your nook storage.
You can repartition if you want, but your setup works well for most people.

leapinlar said:
You have everything right. With the older Nook Colors they came with 1000MB set aside for app storage and 5000MB for media storage. Usually the 1000 MB is plenty for apps. You have used about 300MB so far storing installed apps and settings for your system apps leaving you with 700MB left. That is a lot. Apps do not take much room. Media is where you eat up storage, pictures, movies, books, etc.
The CWM card you used does not effect your nook storage.
You can repartition if you want, but your setup works well for most people.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How hard is it to repartition? I've got around 2gb of manga I copied off my former Touchpad that I was hoping to copy over. I know, the easy answer would be to just buy a bigger microSD card but I wanted to see what I can get out of the Nook itself first.

MJPByron said:
How hard is it to repartition? I've got around 2gb of manga I copied off my former Touchpad that I was hoping to copy over. I know, the easy answer would be to just buy a bigger microSD card but I wanted to see what I can get out of the Nook itself first.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is not really hard to repartition. There is a thread here that tells you how to do it.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=14101197
As I said earlier, the original nooks had 1GB for app storage (/data) and 5GB for media (emmc). The newer nooks came with 5GB for apps and 1GB for media. The author of the above thread offers zips to repartition to either scheme and even included a 2GB app/4GB media version.
I don't know what manga is, is it media or apps? You already have the optimum setup for media. A bigger SD is generally used for more media storage. I really think you might not understand how each partition is used. The app partition (/data) only stores the app program itself and some minor settings files. All of the data that a program uses like books, document files, etc. or downloaded things like music, etc are stored on media partitions like the 5GB media partition (emmc) or sdcard. So I'm not sure you need to change anything. You only want to change if you want more room to store many very large programs (not the files they use).

leapinlar said:
It is not really hard to repartition. There is a thread here that tells you how to do it.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=14101197
As I said earlier, the original nooks had 1GB for app storage (/data) and 5GB for media (emmc). The newer nooks came with 5GB for apps and 1GB for media. The author of the above thread offers zips to repartition to either scheme and even included a 2GB app/4GB media version.
I don't know what manga is, is it media or apps? You already have the optimum setup for media. A bigger SD is generally used for more media storage. I really think you might not understand how each partition is used. The app partition (/data) only stores the app program itself and some minor settings files. All of the data that a program uses like books, document files, etc. or downloaded things like music, etc are stored on media partitions like the 5GB media partition (emmc) or sdcard. So I'm not sure you need to change anything. You only want to change if you want more room to store many very large programs (not the files they use).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Manga's Japanese comics, so in this case media.
In the repartition thread, would I be using the 1.1 "old" partition zip? And am I just booting to a CWM SD card and running the zip after backing up the device? Or is there a different set of steps since it's a rooted device already?
I may give it the test of time and see if I do need to futz with the partition table after all, but if I do I'd like to have the basics ready to go.

MJPByron said:
Manga's Japanese comics, so in this case media.
In the repartition thread, would I be using the 1.1 "old" partition zip? And am I just booting to a CWM SD card and running the zip after backing up the device? Or is there a different set of steps since it's a rooted device already?
I may give it the test of time and see if I do need to futz with the partition table after all, but if I do I'd like to have the basics ready to go.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From what you said in your first post you already have the old partition scheme. No need to change anything. Anything you do will give you less media storage space which is what you need for your comix.
You do not need to be rooted. All you need is the ability to boot to a CWM card and backup and flash things.

[Q] Space not freed up after messing with .thumbnails

Heya guys,
yesterday, I found that I was in dire need of some more free space on my GT-I9505's internal storage and found that only the contents of /sdcard/DCIM/.thumbnails were taking up space. After a while of trying to get rid of those files that kept creating themselves again, I followed some advice I read on an Android forum: I deleted the contents of the .thumbnail folder, went to Settings -> Apps and cleared the data of the Gallery and Media Storage apps, respectively, before rebooting the phone.
The contents did disappear for good, but neither Total Commander nor the list of installed apps in the settings nor the Storage summary in the settings showed any different amount of free space than before. To make matters worse, the number didn't even change after I found and deleted about 1 GB of files left by an already uninstalled app, i.e. it seems to be stuck on that value. At the same time, SD Maid tells me that I should have a good 5 GB of free space more than the system is showing. Neither restarting nor wiping the cache and dalvik cache helped.
My rooted GT-I9505 is running this unofficial port of AOKP 4.3, Milestone 1, and version 6.15.6 of PhilZ/CWM Advanced. I'm not sure whether there's more information I might need to provide, other than that the size of the thumbnails files apparently exploded (about 4 GB) when I moved quite a lot of data and obb folders to my external storage using FolderMount.
I didn't find any information about this kind of problem anywhere and am afraid I messed up so badly that I might need to reflash...or worse. Do you have an idea how I can try to fix it?

Aironfaar said:
Heya guys,
yesterday, I found that I was in dire need of some more free space on my GT-I9505's internal storage and found that only the contents of /sdcard/DCIM/.thumbnails were taking up space. After a while of trying to get rid of those files that kept creating themselves again, I followed some advice I read on an Android forum: I deleted the contents of the .thumbnail folder, went to Settings -> Apps and cleared the data of the Gallery and Media Storage apps, respectively, before rebooting the phone.
The contents did disappear for good, but neither Total Commander nor the list of installed apps in the settings nor the Storage summary in the settings showed any different amount of free space than before. To make matters worse, the number didn't even change after I found and deleted about 1 GB of files left by an already uninstalled app, i.e. it seems to be stuck on that value. At the same time, SD Maid tells me that I should have a good 5 GB of free space more than the system is showing. Neither restarting nor wiping the cache and dalvik cache helped.
My rooted GT-I9505 is running this unofficial port of AOKP 4.3, Milestone 1, and version 6.15.6 of PhilZ/CWM Advanced. I'm not sure whether there's more information I might need to provide, other than that the size of the thumbnails files apparently exploded (about 4 GB) when I moved quite a lot of data and obb folders to my external storage using FolderMount.
I didn't find any information about this kind of problem anywhere and am afraid I messed up so badly that I might need to reflash...or worse. Do you have an idea how I can try to fix it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This will always be in the sdcard and sdcard/DCIM

Androiders96 said:
This will always be in the sdcard and sdcard/DCIM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your reply. However, the .thumbnails folder is empty since I deleted its content, cleared the data of the Gallery and Media Storage apps and rebooted as I described in my original post...so apparently, it will not always be there but still take up the space if you mess something up as I did.
Since then, the amount of free space seems to be stuck at the value from before the deletion of the .thumbnails contents, even though I deleted other, considerably large amounts of files since then as well, which should have freed up some more space. That can't be healthy for any kind of storage.
Some error in the file system, perhaps? Maybe some part of the OS keeps the space allocated but forgot what it was allocated for because I cleared the Gallery and Media Storage apps' information about it along with the data? I do not know, neither do I know how to fix it, and I'm getting increasingly worried.

Aironfaar said:
Thank you for your reply. However, the .thumbnails folder is empty since I deleted its content, cleared the data of the Gallery and Media Storage apps and rebooted as I described in my original post...so apparently, it will not always be there but still take up the space if you mess something up as I did.
Since then, the amount of free space seems to be stuck at the value from before the deletion of the .thumbnails contents, even though I deleted other, considerably large amounts of files since then as well, which should have freed up some more space. That can't be healthy for any kind of storage.
Some error in the file system, perhaps? Maybe some part of the OS keeps the space allocated but forgot what it was allocated for because I cleared the Gallery and Media Storage apps' information about it along with the data? I do not know, neither do I know how to fix it, and I'm getting increasingly worried.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
no, it's from the rom, every rom will appear .thumbnail
Cache images on the gallery
All will be stored in .thumbnail
I do not know how to fix this :/

Androiders96 said:
no, it's from the rom, every rom will appear .thumbnail
Cache images on the gallery
All will be stored in .thumbnail
I do not know how to fix this :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So you're saying it's controlled by the rom and Media Storage and Gallery merely use system functions or the like to create and manage those thumbnail files? I see, thanks for that information.
I assume that means I'm humped. After all, I made those two apps forget that they told the rom to allocate the space, which the rom apparently still is doing...
I guess I'll try if reflashing the rom will help, but I most probably won't have the time for that for a week or two. Until then, I'd be more than happy and thankful to hear more ideas.

Use free space in system partition

Hello,
I really like my G2 but i have one annoying issue:
When using one of those great custom roms i end up with pretty much free space on internal storage (system partition).
Since i'm having the 16GB-version i have ~10GB of usable space and currently ~7GB wasted space.
When using OSM-Maps 10GB is not much so i hope there is a way to utilize the free space on internal storage.
I have several ideas but i'm no dev and i hardly know about linux and even less about android.
So thats what i thought of:
Idea 1: Change partition size.
Well i think not a good idea but on my old HTC HD2 i could choose how the storage is partitioned. Don't know if this is possible on G2 and if changes there are not to risky.
Idea 2: Create a virtual SD-Card.
I know that this is possible somehow because i can do that with androidx86 on my tablet. So why dont write an app or zip-File-Patch that creates a custom-size virtual sd-card on internal storage/system partition. Problem is that i can't do that. Help of a dev would be needed.
Idea 3: Redirect folders.
On Linux and Windows it's possible to create "virtual folders" that are just links to the real folder that is stored somewhere else. Pretty handy on windows to move music-library to sd-card with full functions for example.
I think i've seen such things on android too when browsing my device. So why don't move for example the DCIM-Folder and others to internal storage this way?
But again a dev would be needed.
Idea 4: Copy some stuff with root and file explorer.
Thats maybe the simpliest way but i don't know how and where i can copy things. For example i've around 4GB of music on my device and if i can still access it i would have no problem to move it to internal storage somewhere. Maybe to ringtones folder or something like this.
But i'm not sure where i should put it to be on internal storage and access being still possible.
It would be great to further discuss this ideas with you and find some kind of solution.

Well i was able to evaluate on Android 4.2.2 that you can put your music folder into the system/media folder but it was only possible with aroma file manger in recovery.
Then the free space on internal storage gets decreased and the available storage gets increased. This means my files are now inside the system partition.
But there are problems:
Even with root total commander was not able to write things to this directory and even after setting permissions in aroma-fm after reboot i cant write there. So handling is painful.
The music app doesnt find the music now
Found that tool then to create a "link" on sdcard that links to the folder in system/media but that fails because it cannot link to this path.
Tool: http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s2/themes-apps/tool-directorybind-data-to-externalsd-t1410262

Overwhelming interest ...
Wrong section??

Well I've found your thread! Did you get anywhere with this?