Considering trying xposed... - Xposed General

Ive come across a couple of root apps that want exposed, to either do more things or to work entirely.
Ive been wanting to try the swypetweaks app, to make the symbols appear on the newer themes, but it needs xposed.
Would installing xposed remove anything or stop anything i currently have from functioning? or does it simple allow more things to function? Id plan on making a backup before i started trying anything anyway, but i was just wondering if its supposed to wipe anything or not??
if something did get messed up and i had to recover from my backup from before i installed it, would it be uninstalled/totally removed once i restored??
basicallyi want to try it out but im afraid to mess anything up lol

Pawprints1986 said:
Ive come across a couple of root apps that want exposed, to either do more things or to work entirely.
Ive been wanting to try the swypetweaks app, to make the symbols appear on the newer themes, but it needs xposed.
Would installing xposed remove anything or stop anything i currently have from functioning? or does it simple allow more things to function? Id plan on making a backup before i started trying anything anyway, but i was just wondering if its supposed to wipe anything or not??
if something did get messed up and i had to recover from my backup from before i installed it, would it be uninstalled/totally removed once i restored??
basicallyi want to try it out but im afraid to mess anything up lol
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Xposed is basically a middleman. As stated in the thread, do a backup in recovery before installing in case you have issues, you can restore imediately. It doesn't change anything on your phone in any way that would affect how you use it by itself. You can think of it like when you use a java app on your computer. The java app doesn't know how to talk to the computer, it talks to java, and that does the work for it. It works on most roms, stock and custom. I've been using it for years, and have had minimal troubles, other than a bootloop when I installed the wrong version, or did something dumb. Basically keep the uninstall in your downloads folder, and a backup of your rom, and just try it out. If something goes wrong, try the uninstall, and if that doesn't fix it, clear cache (dalvik too) and restore the rom backup, and you are running like always. The modules can't do anything or affect your system when you remove xposed. Any more questions, please ask. If you quote my post, I'll notice faster and respond within an hour usually, or one of the other awesome members can help out too!

kdb424 said:
Xposed is basically a middleman. As stated in the thread, do a backup in recovery before installing in case you have issues, you can restore imediately. It doesn't change anything on your phone in any way that would affect how you use it by itself. You can think of it like when you use a java app on your computer. The java app doesn't know how to talk to the computer, it talks to java, and that does the work for it. It works on most roms, stock and custom. I've been using it for years, and have had minimal troubles, other than a bootloop when I installed the wrong version, or did something dumb. Basically keep the uninstall in your downloads folder, and a backup of your rom, and just try it out. If something goes wrong, try the uninstall, and if that doesn't fix it, clear cache (dalvik too) and restore the rom backup, and you are running like always. The modules can't do anything or affect your system when you remove xposed. Any more questions, please ask. If you quote my post, I'll notice faster and respond within an hour usually, or one of the other awesome members can help out too!
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Have you noticed any more noticible ram being sucked up by something else running? Or does it only run when called for, like java? I know lots of people use it so i cant imagine its a ram hog, but im only working with 1 gig of ram.
the app i originally wanted to try it for, i found a better (severely under rated) keybaord that i like, even better i think, and all the themes arent extra purchases either. but I know greenify, and something else has asked me about exposed too, but i just kept saying no, cuz i was afraid to mess up. lol.

Pawprints1986 said:
Have you noticed any more noticible ram being sucked up by something else running? Or does it only run when called for, like java? I know lots of people use it so i cant imagine its a ram hog, but im only working with 1 gig of ram.
the app i originally wanted to try it for, i found a better (severely under rated) keybaord that i like, even better i think, and all the themes arent extra purchases either. but I know greenify, and something else has asked me about exposed too, but i just kept saying no, cuz i was afraid to mess up. lol.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Xposed itself doesn't seem to take much ram at all. I have run it all the way back to devices like my HTC Incredible, which was released on 2010. That has 512MB RAM and it seemed to run fine. As for modules, they tend to use very little ram. Greenify takes 10MB and powernap takes 3.7MB on my oneplus one. To compare that, Swiftkey takes 49MB and ran just fine even on the incredible with only 512MB RAM. Do a backup, try it out, and if it doesn't work out, restore /system and it's uninstalled. Well, then uninstall modules. For me, it's a must have personally, and I always try it out, even when I know things may or may not work, because it's so easy to remove if things don't go as planned. Make sure you have a backup, and you are golden. Super easy fix on he rare occasion something breaks.

kdb424 said:
Xposed itself doesn't seem to take much ram at all. I have run it all the way back to devices like my HTC Incredible, which was released on 2010. That has 512MB RAM and it seemed to run fine. As for modules, they tend to use very little ram. Greenify takes 10MB and powernap takes 3.7MB on my oneplus one. To compare that, Swiftkey takes 49MB and ran just fine even on the incredible with only 512MB RAM. Do a backup, try it out, and if it doesn't work out, restore /system and it's uninstalled. Well, then uninstall modules. For me, it's a must have personally, and I always try it out, even when I know things may or may not work, because it's so easy to remove if things don't go as planned. Make sure you have a backup, and you are golden. Super easy fix on he rare occasion something breaks.
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Click to collapse
So, other than the possible odd app that may directly ask for it, does it do anything for the overall phone differently? I think i read that it replaces dalvik, which i also dont quite understand. i know the dalvik cache is like windows prefetch files, but as for dalvik it self, im not too sure. is it better than dalvik? (or, did i read the wrong information somewhere?)

Pawprints1986 said:
So, other than the possible odd app that may directly ask for it, does it do anything for the overall phone differently? I think i read that it replaces dalvik, which i also dont quite understand. i know the dalvik cache is like windows prefetch files, but as for dalvik it self, im not too sure. is it better than dalvik? (or, did i read the wrong information somewhere?)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It doesn't replace it so much as hook into it. Think of how cheat programs can hook into games, or like the steam overlay on games. It hooks in and modifies. Basically, unless you run a module,Aka, an app that needs xposed, then you won't even notice a single bit of difference. Almost 0 ram impact, no discernible performance drop, nada. It's basically a resource hook that allows other apps to hook in to the system. It has different versions for ART and Dalvik (Depending on android version) because they do things differently, so it basically just hooks as needed, and the modules (xposed apps that you want to work) just borrow what xposed knows how to do so each single app doesn't have to figure it out. It's known as a framework. It's just a tool for things to use. Xposed modules can all use that framework to make changes to the system that you ask them to, but otherwise, if you have none installed, it just straps on the system, then does basically nothing as it doesn't really do anything by itself.

Related

so i have a lot of questions

so to start off, ill say i know absolutly nothing about linux, but i managed to root and flash modacos custom rom to my phone. i have no idea what any of the commands i used to do it mean, or how to use any of them to do anything else (other than removing a bunch of the crap that sprint puts on the phone, i managed to do that with the help of one of the other threads on here). anyways, ive got that done and am wondering what to do now. i came from a titan and am used to when im done flashing things, everything is totally different. like going from stock rom to having m2d and it being super sweet. with the new rom it seems like there isnt a lot of new stuff going on or a lot of changes. wifi tether works amazingly though. anyways, im done with the pointless ranting and heres what im trying to figure out....
1. are all of my contacts really saved to gmail? like all of the stuff from all of them? so if i hard reset, and just sign into my gmail account, will it reload all of my contacts? im used to pim backup and knowing that its all gonna be there after im done doing stuff (ive never used gmail before and am not sure how it works)
2. if i do a hard reset, do i need to redo everything like root and re-flash the custom rom or will all of that stay intact? will all of the sprint garbage like nascar be back on there after doing the cmd propmt remove of it or will i have to do that again? im not nessicarily worried about the apps that i have installed already so im not worried about that at all, i can find them later.
3. is there anything usefull that i can do with root that will increase performance or anything. like i said earlier, i dont know anything about linux , so is there like a list of comands somewhere to look through that might help me out?
4. does a2sd see your programs and automatically move them to the sd with the proper formatting of the sd card? i did the fat32, ext2 and swap. since i didnt know if it moved them over, i manually uninstalled everything and reinstalled them. after uninstalling everything i had 104 free and after reinstall i had 101.
5. would it be benificial to go ahead and do a hard reset, if the sprint crap is back on on all of that other **** that can be erased is back, get rid of that, and start from scratch to install all of my stuff i want. i dl a lot of **** that i uninstalled before. i hear linux is really good at installing and uninstalling things, but if ive dl'ed 75 things then uninstallled them, is there gonna be any garbage left on my phone from it? i know there was a lot of garbage left on the sd before i formated. actually, there was **** on there (on the sd) from progs i dl'ed and uninstalled awhile ago, even after formating so im thinging a hard reset would be helpful.
im sure ill have a lot more questions about this whole linux/android stuff sooo.....if people are trying to be helpful and help me out that would be awesome. if your going to be an asshole and blast me for my nubbish questions, dont bother.
thanks in advance
ix3u
The super-custom ROMS are on their way, they just take some time (we only got root this past weekend afterall!)
1.) Some contacts are saved to your phone, but I believe the default is to save it to gmail. You can check by going into the People App, click menu->View and the numbers should show you how much is on google and how many are on your phone.
2.) I'm afraid I'm not sure on a hard reset...I use Nandroid and if all else fails, the RUU to recover (Nandroid is just a snapshot in time...it will be however it was when you backed it up when you restore....while the RUU puts it back to true "factory", as if you just pulled it out of the box).
3.) There's a few things you can do to the UI settings that can increase performance, but the real performance gains are pending the release of the CDMA Kernel by HTC for us to play with and port some of the performance changes that were done to the GSM Kernel (Google for Teknologic's Kernel 1.8...it's included in MoDaCo 2.9). Teknologic kept a very good changelog and site describing some of the things he did and why.
4.) I have no experience with A2SD, but there's a bunch of threads about it...hopefully one of them will have teh answer you seek?
5.) I suppose a hard reset couldn't hurt...it would certainly rule a lot of things out when troubleshooting. I download a lot of apps too only to find I didn't like them enough to keep them and removed them. From what I can tell, it does clean up the application files pretty thoroughly on the OS partitions...the SD card I believe most apps leave alone on uninstall just to be careful not to delete too much because the SD card is designed for people to access and drop files onto, whereas the OS is meant to be managed by the OS...so it's just being careful to leave data on the SD card to play it safe rather than risk deleting someone's favorite picture of their kid or something.
Xda has been one of the more gentle forums I've seen in a long time. You're in good hands here. Hopefully some of that info was useful...if not, someone else will likely be along shortly to give better/more complete answers. ^_^

Upgraded from Fresh 2.0d to Fresh 2.1.1 without wiping, everything seems fine. Is it?

Last night after it was found out the leak and the official release were identical I loaded Fresh 2.1.1. I realized as it was loading I forgot to wipe the phone. I figured I'd let it finish and just have to redo it, but I turned my phone on anyway, just to see.
Everything seems fine. The update seemed to leave everything in tact, while running fine. (and freeing up 55mb of space for apps despite seemingly installing the same apps and leaving mine) The update worked, there are noticeable style differences in quite a few places.
My question is, is this an illusion? Am I not really running the updated versions in some areas? Are there behind the scenes things going on that make it error check and fall back to old "backward comparability" type things, make it slower, etc? Or is wiping just a "safety" thing to give you the best odds of success?
Is my phone going to burst into flames in my sleep, or did I get lucky because most incompatibility examples would be obvious?
I'm not using apps2sd.
Wiping is a safety thing, and also required if there are major changes between versions.
If it is working then don't worry about it. I have flashed 2.1 ROMs over each other before without any problems before, for example a Damageless's Rom over Flipz's. I think as long as the framework matches there is likely to be no problem.
I found one thing that doesn't work. The people app force closes every time I go to actually view a contact.
Does anyone know a good way to clear the contacts without deleting them? (If you delete them in the contact app google syncs the deletion, as it should.)
Actually it looks like it's only a problem on the contacts linked to facebook. Maybe if I can find a way to unlink them, and then link them again, without opening them, they'll be fine.
Just had to removed and re add my facebook account. Good times. So maybe people don't need to redo their phone to jump from 2.0d to 2.1.1. Give it a try.
You've inspired me to give it a try. i, however unlike you, do use a2sd and it's picky as **** so hopefully that stays in tact.
I'll post results after.

[Q] Do I want to root, debloat, or do I need one to do the other?

I'm not as tech savvy as most of you, but I'm motivated because 1)I just can't stand buying something outright, then having someone else tell me how I can use it, and 2) I follow directions well.
I mostly use my phone to game and as a personal data assistant, with some web searching and very light Facebooking. I don't use ANY of the beaming/dongle/att suite/Samsung Suite, at all.
I got here because I use Clean Master, and it shows me constantly using in excess of 84% RAM, even though I've 'turned off' 63 force loaded apps. 63! And it keeps trying to force download stuff I've turned off. I'm ready to sail this freaking ad-machine into a wall.
So, do I want to root it and use a custom ROM, debloat it, or do I need to do one to do the other? I've done a lot of reading, and there is a ton of info, but it seems to be what to do after this decision point. If I root, does that wipe my phone, or does that happen when I install the custom ROM? Is there someone here who can walk me through it, or point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance for dealing with 'Mr. Newbtastic.'
Kamchak said:
I'm not as tech savvy as most of you, but I'm motivated because 1)I just can't stand buying something outright, then having someone else tell me how I can use it, and 2) I follow directions well.
I mostly use my phone to game and as a personal data assistant, with some web searching and very light Facebooking. I don't use ANY of the beaming/dongle/att suite/Samsung Suite, at all.
I got here because I use Clean Master, and it shows me constantly using in excess of 84% RAM, even though I've 'turned off' 63 force loaded apps. 63! And it keeps trying to force download stuff I've turned off. I'm ready to sail this freaking ad-machine into a wall.
So, do I want to root it and use a custom ROM, debloat it, or do I need to do one to do the other? I've done a lot of reading, and there is a ton of info, but it seems to be what to do after this decision point. If I root, does that wipe my phone, or does that happen when I install the custom ROM? Is there someone here who can walk me through it, or point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance for dealing with 'Mr. Newbtastic.'
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
All that searching and found nothing for such a popular group of questions.
You can force stop most of the Samsung bloat ware and disable it, but to fully get rid of it you need to root. How you get rid of it is a different question. 1) manually going through system files and deleting the apk and shtuff, 2) invest in titanium backup pro to freeze the apps, or uninstall them, 3) a popular choice, probably the easiest; flash a pre-debloated ROM, and surely you know how to search so thoroughly to find those.
Rooting does not wipe the device. Installing Safestrap, the only recovery available, does not wipe the device. Installing Xposed and its many modules does not wipe the device. Going into Safestrap recovery, selecting wipe, and factory resetting the device...will wipe the device...and is forcefully suggested by all ROM makers so that you can get a clean install... on a wiped device. Factory resetting is the default option and normally the only one needed for a clean install, and it will not touch your extSDcard, or all those precious pictures and songs that fill your device.
Of course, no one would flash a ROM so often if there was no way to back up all your apps and games and level 80 dark elf, which is exactly what Titanium backup is for. Buy the pro key and you don't have to individually backup or restore any app or data.
This pretty much rounded all bases.
Thank you very much. There's a Q&A post (and I read all 28 pages of it), but it seemed to deal with what happens after my question. Your answer is extremely helpful for those of us with less technical knowledge. Thanks, again!
Kamchak said:
Thank you very much. There's a Q&A post (and I read all 28 pages of it), but it seemed to deal with what happens after my question. Your answer is extremely helpful for those of us with less technical knowledge. Thanks, again!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If no one asked questions, there'd be no answers. Glad to help ?

Rooted, now what?

I got a new wifi S2, installed the permissive kernel and rooted it. I installed TWRP and made a backup. Now I've got an uninstall app and I've removed a few things; primarily Knox and the security logger so that it quits whining at me. I have a strong desire to never ever use the cloud, create a Samsung account, or a Google account. I really just want to load some books onto it and DLNA some music and videos.
So I want to get rid of all the stuff that I'll never be able to use but it's not clear to me how to identify all that. I'm a long time Unix guy but not at all an android guy. If something prompts me to create an account I know I want to uninstall it, but damned if I can figure out how to identify what to uninstall from what icon I touched.
I've found bloatware lists but they're all somewhat old and not for the S2, so it's not clear to me if I should trust them. I'd like to avoid trial and error "uninstall and reinstall if something doesn't work" or the even more dreaded "uninstall and find out six months later that something doesn't work". Can anyone point me at a good list of what I can remove, or where I can figure out how to determine that for myself? Thanks.
Better start freezen apps instead of uninstalling them. I use titanium backup for that, but you can use whatever you like. Just be carefull freezing or uninstalling OS related apps, you can end in a bootloop, but you always have the odin flash method to reflash your system back to normal. Just don't play around with partitions or /dev .
Right now I using my tablet unrooted and untouched, so I can't be more specific which apps you can freeze without problems.
He doesn't need odin as he has a twrp backup.
I take it you are using System App Remover (root) to uninstall system apps? If so you are pretty safe as they are backed up and can be restored any time if something goes wrong.
Also are you aware without a Google account you will lose part of the functionality of an Android device?
Samsungs account you can do without. All that stuff related to it can be deleted, but don't advise removing any of the Google core services from the stock rom.
If you really want a GAPPless rom then you're better off with a non stock custom rom like CM or AOSP.
Not much in that area of development at the moment, but there are a couple of members working on it.
ashyx said:
He doesn't need odin as he has a twrp backup.
I take it you are using System App Remover (root) to uninstall system apps? If so you are pretty safe as they are backed up and can be restored any time if something goes wrong.
Also are you aware without a Google account you will lose part of the functionality of an Android device?
Samsungs account you can do without. All that stuff related to it can be deleted, but don't advise removing any of the Google core services from the stock rom.
If you really want a GAPPless rom then you're better off with a non stock custom rom like CM or AOSP.
Not much in that area of development at the moment, but there are a couple of members working on it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, thanks. If I lose functionality to avoid Google watching over my shoulder I'm all for it. I'm old and probably overprotective of what's my business and not theirs. In truth, I bought the S2 because I have a collection of chess book pdf's and djvu's that I want to be able to read while I'm sitting at my chess board. I got the 9.7 inch S2 because the old eyes aren't what they used to be. Anything I can do beyond that is icing on the cake.
I do have the app remover, and I've removed the stuff that was obvious to me (like the Microsoft Office stubs). But there are still lots of things that bring up a prompt for an account when I run them and it's not clear to me how to figure out what app to remove to get rid of that particular thing. On Linux I could use rpm -q to figure out what rpm contained a file I want to remove and I'd be good to go. I've tried googling some of the app names but the "descriptions" I end up finding are particularly unenlightening. And since this is definitely not my area of expertise I don't really want to operate in "let's remove this and see what happens" even if I can reinstall the app from its backup. I've been doing software development and sysadmin for more than 35 years now and that just doesn't seem like the way to approach this.
I was looking at CM, which seems like it might be what I'm looking for, but it's still in alpha and my skill level is probably not up to coping with that so I'm back with the problem of how to decide what to get rid of.

Question for devs!

So, I wonder?
I've been digging through the system files in my unlocked, rooted UA v40, and except for the apps that came installed with the phone, there's also some in the root that didn't come alive, just taking up space? I know, there's no need to clear space, but I still wonder!? And it also seam to exist some dalvik even for the apps that never came alive in the first place?
Following today's Android rules, is it still possible to clear Dalvik?
Say, if I delete the apps in root/system/product that aren't even installed, will it scr.. something up?
I guess there's some kind of script executed while flashing the rom. If I delete apps (in the right place), and factory reset my phone, will that corrupt something? Is there a file (command/script) I can edit in root, that decides what app to install, to make this work?
Back in the days I deleted unvanted apps before flashing the rom, but I understand it's different today...
Not very important, but would be nice to know
Not a dev but thought I'd throw in some thoughts. We don't have any "stock based" dev to bug regarding stock fw really.
From my own digging through newer fw releases, it seems that LG hired some really lazy mofos as coders. Looks like they create new fw from old ones, then updated it to new versions plus some tweaks to suit the target model.
For a programmer that'd make sense since you already have the base code, you just change modules and libs as needed. However, in LG's case, their guys didn't bother to remove anything that was already there. They just kept adding on stuff. That's where you see the unused apps (and also explain why stock fw sizes keep getting bigger). Hell, I even found G8 specific settings in the service menu earlier today. Best I can tell, there aren't any symlinks that tie back to these unused apps, so, technically, removing them won't break anything. But given how sloppy the existing structure is, it wouldn't be surprising if it does either.
Now dalvik on the other hand, that' and interesting point. Since dalvik was dropped when google implemented ART, it theoretically, shouldn't even be on the phone. Where did you find those?
That's just stupid of LG
I mean, what does "Airmotion" do in v40? Hahaha!
Oh, I still say Dalvik, aware of art.
Thanks
This is what I mean
This is one of the apps that wasn't really installed to be used in v40. Is it normal that one of those apps still got art files? So if I was to delete this app, can I delete the linked art files too?
Can anyone port the v40 camera app for lg v30 pie?
This was my main question:
I guess there's some kind of script executed while flashing the rom. If I delete apps (in the right place), and factory reset my phone, will that corrupt something? Is there a file (command/script) I can edit in root, that decides what app to install, to make this work by factory reset?
neocyke said:
Not a dev but thought I'd throw in some thoughts. We don't have any "stock based" dev to bug regarding stock fw really.
From my own digging through newer fw releases, it seems that LG hired some really lazy mofos as coders. Looks like they create new fw from old ones, then updated it to new versions plus some tweaks to suit the target model.
For a programmer that'd make sense since you already have the base code, you just change modules and libs as needed. However, in LG's case, their guys didn't bother to remove anything that was already there. They just kept adding on stuff. That's where you see the unused apps (and also explain why stock fw sizes keep getting bigger). Hell, I even found G8 specific settings in the service menu earlier today. Best I can tell, there aren't any symlinks that tie back to these unused apps, so, technically, removing them won't break anything. But given how sloppy the existing structure is, it wouldn't be surprising if it does either.
Now dalvik on the other hand, that' and interesting point. Since dalvik was dropped when google implemented ART, it theoretically, shouldn't even be on the phone. Where did you find those?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I noticed that on the V30 already too.
Settings are enabled/disabled depending on the props set, and which device its running on, some you should even be able to activate/deactivate during runtime...
Makes things way easier to develop that way, yes... but also unneccessarily bloats the whole UI... should have set flags during compilation to fully exclude the code (e.g. how the HALs do that lol)

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