Database Info

Replace all your default apps. want it?

Would you guys want a simple pack that would replace your default g1 apps automatically with better versions?
There are enough now where it would be a good idea.
Apps to be replaced:
Messaging replaced by ChompSMS.
Browser replaced by Steel.
Contacts replaced by Phonebook.
Alarmclock replaced by Klaxon.
Camera replaced by SnapPhoto.
I've talked to the developers and made sure that these apps are all standalone. Phonebook syncs on its own with your google contacts. Chomp receives texts independent of messaging.
It would be relatively noob friendly. If you were able to push your caches to the sd card, this would work fine.

If ChompSMS could handle MMS messages it might be a good idea, but as it stands I just removed it because it kept crashing on me anytime I even so much as looked at it wrong.

Hm. Good point with chomp. But I don't actually do mms messages. That's what email is for.

I was just thinking about this a few minutes ago. Mainly to replace the camera app with snapPhoto, and messaging with Chomp (never had any probs with chomp).

That's what I was forgetting. Snapphoto. That's now on the list as well.

You see, that would be nice if any of those apps worked decently...
The only halfway decent one you mentioned was chomp. The only stable thing you mentioned was SnapPhoto.
Phonebook is very slow and way too unresponsive to replace the contacts app, not to mention it has no option to set individual ringtones yet.
Steel is nice and all, but lacking BASIC functionality. For example on the stock browser when you go to a youtube page it gives you an option of playing through the youtube app. Steel does not, so it just leaves you not being able to watch shows.
Klaxon is extremely buggy. For example when in keyboard mode half of the klaxon screen is chopped off. Also when hitting snooze it usually takes a couple tries to put it to sleep.
Its a good try, but not quite ready yet.

I would definitely appreciate this. I'd never heard of steel before you mentioned it.

TuXeyM11 said:
You see, that would be nice if any of those apps worked decently...
The only halfway decent one you mentioned was chomp. The only stable thing you mentioned was SnapPhoto.
Phonebook is very slow and way too unresponsive to replace the contacts app, not to mention it has no option to set individual ringtones yet.
Steel is nice and all, but lacking BASIC functionality. For example on the stock browser when you go to a youtube page it gives you an option of playing through the youtube app. Steel does not, so it just leaves you not being able to watch shows.
Klaxon is extremely buggy. For example when in keyboard mode half of the klaxon screen is chopped off. Also when hitting snooze it usually takes a couple tries to put it to sleep.
Its a good try, but not quite ready yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
everything is entirely functional. steel gives you the option of opening it up in the viewer. phonebook is extremely quick and klaxon rapes the basic alarmclock.

As you can see from the responses, the problem is going to be that most people like and regularly use some but not all of those programs(for me it's steel and snap-photo, cause I like the normal contact manager and messaging, etc), so 1 package that replaces all of them won't be worth it for 90% of people. Would separate packages replacing 1 system app each be possible? Then people could pick and choose which ones they want.

This is a great idea once these apps mature a little more.
Like other have said, MMS support is needed in ChompSMS before it's a viable replacement for the built in messaging app.
I have problems every morning with Klaxon hitting the Off button. It rarely responds on the first hit.
I'm still having trouble seeing where Phonebook fits in as a replacement for the default phone app. It doesn't feel like a complete app yet. Exact Call Log is far better in my opinion, and faster. I know it doesn't have an integrated dialer, but for the logging portion, it's superior.
SnapPhoto is a decently solid app. I would have no qualms about replacing Camera.apk with SnapPhoto.

[email protected] said:
As you can see from the responses, the problem is going to be that most people like and regularly use some but not all of those programs(for me it's steel and snap-photo, cause I like the normal contact manager and messaging, etc), so 1 package that replaces all of them won't be worth it for 90% of people. Would separate packages replacing 1 system app each be possible? Then people could pick and choose which ones they want.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
it might take me a couple days, but i could throw together a program that shows u a checklist and you select what replacements you want and what you dont.
thanks for the decent criticism.

Steel is a great browser. It also lets me download whatever file type I want, unlike the default chrome lite.

so it's decided.
I'll put up a little prog that allows you to choose which apps youd want defaulted from that list and it'l be installed automatically.
expect it within the next couple days.

I'm pretty sure snapphoto isn't standalone. When I replaced the stock app with it. I got force close errors in the area where you'd normally share/save. Also you lose the stock picture viewer, which not essential since you can use a file viewer, though it is a lot easier to use thumbnails then reading file names. But I know bratag updates it frequently so perhaps something has changed since I tried it. In fact I hope you can do it, I'll be following closely to see if its possible.

constellanation said:
I'm pretty sure snapphoto isn't standalone. When I replaced the stock app with it. I got force close errors in the area where you'd normally share/save. Also you lose the stock picture viewer, which not essential since you can use a file viewer, though it is a lot easier to use thumbnails then reading file names. But I know bratag updates it frequently so perhaps something has changed since I tried it. In fact I hope you can do it, I'll be following closely to see if its possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah. If you delete Camera.apk then SnapPhoto starts acting up. If you delete Email.apk then Gmail no longer appears in the "Recent Apps" list when you hold the Home button.
Deleting Alarm.apk and the Amazon MP3 app doesn't seem to have any negetive effects, though.

For the snapphoto issue, I removed camera.apk. named snapphoto.apk camera.apk and pushed it into the system apps folder. That's what I am going to be doing with all the other apps itself. The core is designed to run with the default apps in mind, but it doesn't care what the app is. It just cares that its where its supposed to be.
You won't be seeing your apps named steel and everything.
Steel will be called browser, chomp = messaging and so on and so forth.
Removing the defaults entirely and not replacing them causes instability.

a little update. just threw together all the vb coding to set up the exe that would create and run the batch file specifically for what apps you want replaced.
the OP has all the options that are listed. expect it tomorrow.
btw. chomp just got autorotate.

a little update. just threw together all the vb coding to set up the exe that would create and run the batch file specifically for what apps you want replaced.
the OP has all the options that are listed. expect it tomorrow.
btw. chomp just got autorotate.

Question...how would we get the updates for these apps? Like, say, if chomp decided to support MMS in the future.

Either one of two ways. You can replace the .apk in the folder I give you with the new version and simply run the .bat file again, or you can just wait till I reupload it with the updated versions.

with Nexus 5 & new to Android Ecosystem, need suggestion

With a heavy heart i have to keep my SEx1 aside and have entered to Android Ecosystem.
I'm a customized freak & made my X1 ROM super stable with my super minimalistic custom rom's, im still going to use that as my primary portable music gear, but for rest of the things Google Nexus 5 is the new companion.
Kitkat is whole new world for me, used gingerbread a a little bit but both are poles apart. hence need some suggestion to keep myself educated with latest trends and tech. Please ignore my noobe-tagged question. So here i start:
No Lollipop ? ?
As broadcasted nexus devices should be the first one to get Android 5.0, Lollipop.
Im yet to get any update & currently running 4.4.4. Any words on when could i expect Lollipop upgrade in my device.
[I don't want to root/ flash until my device is out of warranty].
Contact Backup & Google sync:
a) When starting the device for first time, it prompted me to use google account credential, i did, and it dumped all thousands of my gmail contact in phonebook. Too bad. i have manually deleted all of them from phonebook. and switched-off auto sync.
b) it refused to sync my contact form X1, which was back uped in outlook under win7. Found an alternative, transfered all my contact via bluetooth to nexus 5 and imported them one-by-one. Again when importing in batches, it gives error, which is kind of helpful for me. I only imported selected contact and not the obsolete 8 yrs old contacts
Now the question: How my Sync my contacts without downloading email-contact from gmail. Another gmail account doesn't seems to be ideal as i use email, calendar, drive from this mail. Please suggest.
Customization:
a) I like to keep my phone at minimals. used mycolorscreen- Themer for few days, which let me customize to what i want till great extent. but its getting corrupt by it own at random times, spoiling my widgets location & functionalities and sometime replacing wallpaper with "black" and have uninstalled it now.
Do we have anything similar to HTC / touchflow full screen animated weather for android? roa any alternative to themer which let me customize N5?
b) Lockscreen customization like changing the background according to themer wallpaper and add few information like battery level, weather, etc. I goggled DashClock please let me know what you guys think about it or any other recommendation.
Few App recommendation
Fitness tracker : currently using Pedometer by j4velin, which is good, but it doesn't give me much control, no difference in distance covered if you running or walking, no actual track of distance covered as it derived from the stride length we enter in the setting. Any recommendation in this please ? should i try Google fit app ?
Pulse Light Controller N5 seriously missing "things" in this department, apart from default white glow of unleaded sms, i never noticed any other indication. they should have provided a notification for low-battery and missed call. Currently using Light Flow but i hate its presence always in my notification area. what's XDA's thoughts in this please? I dont need anything with bells and whistles, just a minimal app which show me red light when my battery is low & some other-then-white-color from unreaded SMS & missed calls.
Vibrate on call connect Got ExDailer but im clueless how to make it the default dialer. Also i liked the stock dialer is there any way to make it vibrate when a call connects, i have to install 3rd party app on my phone
Cache cleaner
as im playing installing, uninstalling lots of stuffs these in these experimenal days what would be a recommended app for this, if its mandatory. have used this bloatware Clean Master in my X10i earlier which killed the phone in multiple ways. any other recommendation please, i just want to clean junk files and do not want any antivirus and gold plating.
Thanks in advance.

- bump -

netant said:
No Lollipop ? ?
As broadcasted nexus devices should be the first one to get Android 5.0, Lollipop.
Im yet to get any update & currently running 4.4.4. Any words on when could i expect Lollipop upgrade in my device.
[I don't want to root/ flash until my device is out of warranty].
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OTAs are a rollout. They don't give it to everyone at the same time.
You can sideload the OTA instead of waiting, and you don't have to unlock the bootloader for that.
There is also no point in "keeping warranty" since the only way to tell is if you have bootloader unlocked/or tamper flag is left triggered. Bootloader is easily re-locked and the tamper flag isn't that big of a deal to reset unlike on many other devices (you can do it with apps lol..). There is no other way to tell unless you blatantly have modified software. Of course, if the device was defective to the point where it doesn't boot up, then the bootloader/tamper flag/any sort of software doesn't even matter anyways. Also, if you bought from the Play Store, Google will even let you send it in with a custom ROM and kernel if you wanted to.
netant said:
Contact Backup & Google sync:
a) When starting the device for first time, it prompted me to use google account credential, i did, and it dumped all thousands of my gmail contact in phonebook. Too bad. i have manually deleted all of them from phonebook. and switched-off auto sync.
b) it refused to sync my contact form X1, which was back uped in outlook under win7. Found an alternative, transfered all my contact via bluetooth to nexus 5 and imported them one-by-one. Again when importing in batches, it gives error, which is kind of helpful for me. I only imported selected contact and not the obsolete 8 yrs old contacts
Now the question: How my Sync my contacts without downloading email-contact from gmail. Another gmail account doesn't seems to be ideal as i use email, calendar, drive from this mail. Please suggest.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mass delete your obsolete contacts from gmail: https://www.google.com/contacts/ then sync them afterwards.
netant said:
Customization:
a) I like to keep my phone at minimals. used mycolorscreen- Themer for few days, which let me customize to what i want till great extent. but its getting corrupt by it own at random times, spoiling my widgets location & functionalities and sometime replacing wallpaper with "black" and have uninstalled it now.
Do we have anything similar to HTC / touchflow full screen animated weather for android? roa any alternative to themer which let me customize N5?
b) Lockscreen customization like changing the background according to themer wallpaper and add few information like battery level, weather, etc. I goggled DashClock please let me know what you guys think about it or any other recommendation.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just look at the Themes and Apps section, there is also a stickied homescreen thread.
netant said:
Few App recommendation
Fitness tracker : currently using Pedometer by j4velin, which is good, but it doesn't give me much control, no difference in distance covered if you running or walking, no actual track of distance covered as it derived from the stride length we enter in the setting. Any recommendation in this please ? should i try Google fit app ?
Pulse Light Controller N5 seriously missing "things" in this department, apart from default white glow of unleaded sms, i never noticed any other indication. they should have provided a notification for low-battery and missed call. Currently using Light Flow but i hate its presence always in my notification area. what's XDA's thoughts in this please? I dont need anything with bells and whistles, just a minimal app which show me red light when my battery is low & some other-then-white-color from unreaded SMS & missed calls.
Vibrate on call connect Got ExDailer but im clueless how to make it the default dialer. Also i liked the stock dialer is there any way to make it vibrate when a call connects, i have to install 3rd party app on my phone
Cache cleaner
as im playing installing, uninstalling lots of stuffs these in these experimenal days what would be a recommended app for this, if its mandatory. have used this bloatware Clean Master in my X10i earlier which killed the phone in multiple ways. any other recommendation please, i just want to clean junk files and do not want any antivirus and gold plating.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't use fitness trackers so I can't say anything about them. The Nexus 5 has a hardware pedometer rather than using sensors like accelerometer/gps/etc to determine steps, which saves a LOT of battery but obviously can't determine distance.
There are a multilude of LED apps.
Cache cleaners are useless since you can wipe cache in recovery anyways, including stock recovery. If you mean for cleaning in general, I don't use anything myself as I don't find it any necessary, but some others do.

netant said:
hence need some suggestion to keep myself educated with latest trends and tech.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are far as this is concerned, there really isn't any big thing with the Nexus 5 that would not be applicable to other phones. Just read around the forums to see if anything piques your interest.

Thanks for the reply.
I will wait some more time for official OTA update, in the meantime exploring the device. once i done i will do a factory reset anyways
contact things is easier to manage in Gmail interface, thanks for pointing out. Took hours to clean all the contact, but feel good after housecleaning

Question about .apk modding - possible to have it erase a database value on launch?

Hey guys,
I'm not sure if this is the best subforum to ask in, but I figured if anybody knew it would be you guys on XDA-devs.
I have a slightly modified Facebook .apk - what I did was take the last version before they bastardized the newsfeed and got rid of "most recent" (it's version 8.something), then open it up and remove a bunch of permissions that I didn't want it having. I left in obvious ones like GPS for checking in, but removed the stuff like "prevent phone from sleeping", drawing over other apps and other really obnoxious things that you normally couldn't opt out of.
I use it on a daily basis. I also hate Messenger - not only because it's two apps instead of one, but because of that same aforementioned issue... the drawing over other apps and there was no way to TURN NOTIFICATIONS OFF ENTIRELY, only for up to an hour.
Anyway, Facebook v8 already has a messenger built in. It's absolutely pointless to use the standalone one. However, there's a value that keeps being generated by their end that I can't control - at least not yet!
What happens is the first time you open messenger after signing in, it says "Upgrade to Messenger? Your friends are using it!" and you can choose "Not now" or upgrade. It does this for a day or two and then eventually the "not now" option goes away and it refuses to let you see your messages without "upgrading" despite the fact the app obviously has the ability to do it just fine.
After some experimentation, I discovered the fix. There are two values that get written in prefs.db (it's /data/data/com.facebook.katana/databases/prefs.db - not sure why prefs.db since it's not really a preferences but I digress)
If you open that up in SQLite Browser, there are three tables... open up "preferences" and there are two values:
/config/force_messenger/first_shown_1
/config/force_messenger/last_shown_1
Then there's a binary timestamp stored in another column in that row.
If I simply delete both of those and restart the app, it works!
But this is a bit annoying to have to do every couple days. I already have my development options set to force-close an app when I long-press the back button, so I was hoping it were possible to put a line of code in the .apk somewhere that just wipes those values, if present, when the app starts. There's nothing I can do about their server sticking those in there, as obviously they want to force people to use Messenger. I CAN just delete the values, though.
At the very least, some script I could set to auto-run (like kill the app and edit the .db) would work too, but I'm going to be getting a new phone soon and want to use it unrooted if possible... so I figured having this done from within the app itself would be a better idea.
Thanks in advance!

RealMe Q - 3rd party messaging app, PC SMS, Start Up Manager issues...

First off, I love this phone and reason why I got the Q China version was because it had the 6GB RAM which the 5 pro does not have with a price gap difference. 90% of this phone is perfect, the other 10% I can live with and hopefully they will make these changes in future updates. For you all looking at this Q model in North America, might want consider this before you get the Q version.
1. Using 3rd party messaging apps, this is basic stuff, why would any company lock you from using another sms app other then the stock one, this is only on the Q models I believe. It's like I'm back using and Iphone again lol. If you go the default settings, it will not list any other installed messaging app. I've been using ChompSMS for years and I love it, not I'm stuck using Q's messaging app, which is not bad but no where close to Chomp. Also, if I'm forced to use their messaging app, at the very least make it more customizable, ie. separate contact tones, pop up quick reply window etc. In ColorOS 6, it use to not even allow me to use another launcher but that got changed/fixed in UI 1.0, thank God, now you can use Nova Prime or your own launcher.
2. PC SMS, I work from home and use my PC to text constantly either with PushBullet or MightyText, with this Messaging app constriction, every time use these PC apps, it asks for a TXT message verification on my phone either face id or fingerprint, kind of defeats the purpose of texting on your PC. I wish there was away around this or a setting, I've looked everywhere in the phone settings and set every damn permission, nope.
3. Startup Manager... great idea to reduce battery use, but only limit to 5? come on. At least give us the option to set how many start up limits we want and just give us a warning that the more we use the more power it drains. Again, back to the Iphone days lol.
Other then these, I'm keeping my phone for all the pros, it's fast, screen looks good, these things are just really annoyances that I hope Oppo/RealMe or whoever will fix in the next OS update. I've seen some post of using custom rom on this Q model but also seeing a lot of glitches, I don't think it's worth having this issues for these minor annoyances. I've been using custom roms on other phones and tablets for years now, some with great luck and some I almost end up throwing the device through my window due to custom rom glitches lol.
If anyone finds a solution(s) for these annoyances other then using custom ROMS, please let me know I'll buy you a coffee and donuts lol.

Sorry, i can't read all of this!!!!
Plz make a short thread

hsm90 said:
Sorry, i can't read all of this!!!!
Plz make a short thread
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is the short version lol How are you not able to read all of this?

New phone with custom rom, keep getting old texts coming back as new texts, how do I make this stop?

I recently got a Pixel 4a 5g and originally tried GrapheneOS and now I'm on Calyx. The issue I have is the stock texting app on either OS does not support group texting which I use a lot with my family. So I had to find a 3rd party app, found QKSMS which supports group texting.
However I don't know if this is an OS or app issue, but at random, I will get old texts back. It will basically be as if it's a new text, but it's an old conversation that just replays itself. It's super annoying and also confusing because sometimes at first I think it's a real text I just got.
Is there a way to make this stop? I'm also open to suggestions on an alternate app but it needs to be something that's in the F droid store, since I don't really want to put Google play on here as it kind of defeats the purpose of having a privacy oriented phone if I start putting apps that spy on me.
I also want to stick with SMS/MMS and not signal etc, because not everybody uses all the same chat app, but SMS is just universal. Everyone I know uses it.
Anyone else ever run into this and found a fix?

Just bumping, hoping someone has a pointer for how I can troubleshoot this?