Develop Bugs

[Q] How does APPS2SD *actually* work?

Hey guys,
Been searching on this for a whle and haven't found the info I'm looking for.
How does the custom APPS2D actually work? By that I mean, what is it really doing? I know it's copying the app(s) to the partitioned ext2/3/4 area of the sdcard, but how does it know *what* part of the app to move as it seems something is always left on the phone.
I'm currently running AdamG's OpenDesire 3.0.5 (nice) and thanks to the script provided by msdl28712 in this thread here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=748529, I can see that APPS2SD is saving me "188MB". Pretty nice.
But my internal memory is still going down. I started out at about 148MB I think. I'm currently at about 115MB free. Of course, that's fantastic - but it sort of suggests that, even though I've downloaded loads of apps to the sd card, they will always leave some footprint/config/data on the internal memory of various sizes (as I can see it on my info page).
So really, I am still quite limited in the number of apps I can store. Even though I gave myself a nice big 4gb ext4 partition, I'll still hit a limit because of the footprint data left behind on the phone's int memory even after "copying to SD".
Is this right or am I way off?

Although I have no Actual knowledge of what you ask I will say this. The phone needs to be able to function if there is a SD card installed or not and therefore it must have info about the apps installed in the phone memory. I would imagine its very similar to windows and the windows registry. The registry will always be stored on the windows (Phone) storage and the program resources can be anywhere. Therefore when you install an app there will always be a small amount of phone storage required to link to and handle the operations of that program.
All in my opinion.

Some apps, not all, I've found in multiple places on my Eris.
I found it strange that the market wasn't consistently placing them in both places ( actually, that's a good thing, cause it would eat double the space ), but that led me to believe that the developer who wrote whichever particular app that was being stored in 2 location, wrote it to store to additional "backup" location ...
For example, say you download an item from the Android market, and it puts it in the "data\app" folder location. Well, I'd also find another copy in the root of the "cache\" folder ....
The way I found this, was I wondering where the heck all my memory was going, especially since I'd recently installed/uninstalled some various music player apps, but the space wasn't being freed up. I went digging through various folders looking for items, and low and behold, started finding the duplicately stored APK files. I started removing them, and I've monitored that files contents on a regular basis since, which has helped.
- JB

What A2SD? A2SD+, A2SD Froyo?
Found a nice explanation on CM Wiki... can't find it now though...
but there's always short explanation by MIUI Au..if you wanna give it a tryy
http://www.miui-au.com/faq/a2sd/

johnrbrown1968 said:
Some apps, not all, I've found in multiple places on my Eris.
I found it strange that the market wasn't consistently placing them in both places ( actually, that's a good thing, cause it would eat double the space ), but that led me to believe that the developer who wrote whichever particular app that was being stored in 2 location, wrote it to store to additional "backup" location ...
For example, say you download an item from the Android market, and it puts it in the "data\app" folder location. Well, I'd also find another copy in the root of the "cache\" folder ....
The way I found this, was I wondering where the heck all my memory was going, especially since I'd recently installed/uninstalled some various music player apps, but the space wasn't being freed up. I went digging through various folders looking for items, and low and behold, started finding the duplicately stored APK files. I started removing them, and I've monitored that files contents on a regular basis since, which has helped.
- JB
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all you are answering a quite old thread(hint: 8th august)
Second to clarify no, the app is not installed to several locations.. The apk file in the cache is just the one, that the market downloads in order to install it(hint: cache) upon installation the file is placed in the /data/app folder or in case you are using a2sd/a2sd+ it will be placed in /sd-ext/app(the phone still think it is in /data/app, but it wont take up space on the /data partition)
After the installation the downloaded .apk file is sometimes left behind, but as the /cache partition have a fixed size, this won't take up any space for app installs(/data) when the space is needed on the cache partition for another download or something else, the file is eventually deleted.
edit: for people, who want to know the answer to OP, please search I and many others have wrote it over and over again in this very forum.

Apps on SD disappeared???

Hi everyone,
In panic mode right now...
I downloaded an app that helps you find all your apps that can be moved to the sd card. So it found 150 or so. After an hour of manually moving each one, I had over 400mb of free internal space and only like 40 apps left on the main phone storage. Awesome... but then this morning I noticed that things were running real slow... so I rebooted my phone. When it came back up I noticed some of my home screen shortcuts had become generic android icons. I went to my launcher & lots of apps were missing. I have a LOT of apps so I can't quite confirm yet whether its all the apps I moved to sd but it seems that way.
When I go to the market I see apps that I had yesterday as not installed. I have astro but I'm not quite sure what folder to look in to see if the apps are all still there, just not being seen by the android system maybe?
I've been driving all morning so I haven't gotten to research this much yet. Just rebooted a couple times hoping to fix it but no luck yet.
Any help is majorly appreciated. As soon as I'm at a computer ill be working on this all day. Freakin disaster!
Dave
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

update to my question
so now that i'm in to work i can mess with this... quick update...
when i go to manage applications and go to "on SD card" i get a big list of apps that have the names like "cn.miren.browser" instead of Miren Browser and "com.alphonso.pulse" instead of Pulse which is kinda normal except usually they then refresh with the regular name and the size listed underneath. well it's been sitting here for 5 minutes now and hasn't change and it still says "Computing..." under each one and instead of the normal icons, its sort of a grayed out generic Android icon with an SD in the bottom right corner of the icon.
so clearly it still knows that these apps are there. it just maybe can't access them? i dont know. could it be the sd card? this is the original 8gb sd card that came with the g2...
any thoughts?

???
so i found out that the sd card had some errors in the file system. so i let windows fix the errors. no help (although my phone boots WAAAAAYYYYYY faster now).
so then i found that i have an extra 8gb microsd laying around (which also happened to be a better, class 6 one too). so i cleared it off and copied over alllll the files to it. booted up. STILL NO GO.
anyone have any ideas here? i'm really running out of ideas here.
when i boot, everything runs great, but all my apps that are installed to sd are gone. also it never says "preparing sd card" in the status bar when booting. then if i go to manage applications it never finishes "computing" the size of apps. if i go to "on sd" it shows all my apps, but says computing, and i can't access them, uninstall them, move them, etc. i'm totally out of ideas here and i really don't want to have to do a system restore.
anyone?

think im having the same problem . has ur market gone too?

fix?
ok so i ended up getting mine fixed using these steps that someone from a company that makes an apps2sd app sent me... the only difference i had to do was since my phone also wouldn't recognize my pc, i had to pop the sd card into my pc directly to delete the .android_secure folder... i don't want to mess up your phone or anything so make sure to read around a bit more before trying this, but this is what worked for me. after i started adding all my apps back one by one i've been fine ever since.:
"I guess the problem is ".android_secure" is not recognized by Android.
Would you try the following steps (I am not sure if it works)?
1. mount phone with PC
2. backup all files under .android_secure
3. delete .android_secure directory
4. unmount
5. try to move an app (any app) to SD card (it forces Android to
create .android_secure on SD)
6. mount phone with PC
7. restore all backuped .android_secure/* files to .android_secure
8. unmount => check if it recognized the apps that you moved to the SD card"

Update troubles with my Wildfire S

This has been a problem with my device since the very begining, and I would like to know if it's a general problem with Android, if it's a specific problem with the Wildfire S, or if it's just that god hates me and he gives me the devices with all the horrible bugs (see this thread for my other inexplicable bug that no one else seems to have).
Sometimes, when I go into the market and try and download app updates, the update goes through it's process of installation, the progress bar fills up and everything... then right as it's about to finish I get an error. "Update failed, please try again." It's very inconsistent too, sometimes I'll try and download an update a few times, and on the third attempt it gets it. Other times the app won't be able to update for months at a time. My mobile has been trying to get an update for "Cut the Rope" for over 3 weeks now. It gets so annoying I turn the WiFi off because he keeps throwing "Updates Available!" notifications at me that are completely useless to me.
Anyone else have this? Or is my WF-S just cursed?

Philippe Lemay said:
This has been a problem with my device since the very begining, and I would like to know if it's a general problem with Android, if it's a specific problem with the Wildfire S, or if it's just that god hates me and he gives me the devices with all the horrible bugs (see this thread for my other inexplicable bug that no one else seems to have).
Sometimes, when I go into the market and try and download app updates, the update goes through it's process of installation, the progress bar fills up and everything... then right as it's about to finish I get an error. "Update failed, please try again." It's very inconsistent too, sometimes I'll try and download an update a few times, and on the third attempt it gets it. Other times the app won't be able to update for months at a time. My mobile has been trying to get an update for "Cut the Rope" for over 3 weeks now. It gets so annoying I turn the WiFi off because he keeps throwing "Updates Available!" notifications at me that are completely useless to me.
Anyone else have this? Or is my WF-S just cursed?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try clearing your cache. How much room have you got on your cache partition and in your data paritions?
It has to download a 15 meg or whatever installer for Cut the rope, then unpacking it then install it then delete the original installer. That takes more than 15 megs.

How do I clear the cache?
Also, can't it use my microSD? I have a 32GB card in there.

Philippe Lemay said:
How do I clear the cache?
Also, can't it use my microSD? I have a 32GB card in there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Use it for what? Can you give me some details? Is your phone S-OFF, rooted, etc?. How much internal memory do you have right now, etc.

d33ps1x said:
Use it for what? Can you give me some details? Is your phone S-OFF, rooted, etc?. How much internal memory do you have right now, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You said that when an app is downloaded it needs to first download a 15 MB "cache partition", I was wondering why it can't use some of the space on the microSD. As for rooting, I have a GSM Wildfire S, from what I understand those are difficult to Root... so no, I've never rooted it, and I don't think it's S-Off (I'm not sure how to check that...)
I think I have 31 MB of free internal memory capacity...

pm setInstallLocation 2 and Apps2SD with Tutorial
Forget all you heard from me before as it seems to have served to confuse you which is fine. No worries.
Read this thread
Where it says to type "adb shell pm setInstallLocation" instead to be safe type:
"adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2" which tells the phone to try to install an app to your sd card by default. 0 is auto and 1 is internal.
Keep in mind that it doesn't move 100% of the app to the phone. App libraries, Dalvik cache data and application cache data will stay on the internal memory but it will buy you some space.
That's it.
PS:
Go somewhere and get your phone XTC-Clipped. You will have a lot more options to create space such as Link2SD which moves the apps, app libraries and dalvik cache files to a second external partition you create.
The nice thing about it is DOES allow you to move widget apps and they work.
Another nice thing about it is when you put your phone into usb mass storage mode, even though the primary partition on it with all your own data, pics etc, gets unmounted in the phone and unusable, the second partition doesn't unmount and you can still run all your apps that are linked to it.
Get clipped! If you have enough for a 32 GB card you have enough to spend $20 to get your phone clipped.
Now
When you are done this REBOOT your phone.
Go to this Android Marketplace link and download apps2sd
WATCH the video tutorial and then start moving apps off your internal memory to your SD card.
Beware not to move things that have widgets you want to use like say Doubletwist music player or Battery Monitor. The widgets will no longer function.
Somewhere in that program is a clear application cache choice as well. Clean up your cache for more room.
30 megs is not enough to download AND install Cut The Rope to your internal memory plus your auto sync will stop working when you drop below 18 megs or so of internal space.
Buy yourself some S-ON room with that setup.
If you want to move individual programs to or from the SD card to the phone and back, etc, you can go to /Settings/Applications/Manage/ scroll to and click on the application in question and choose the option to "Move to Phone" or "Move to SD Card".
Cheers.

I see... and this is all low risk right? I mean, getting updates to Cut the Rope would be nice, but it's not the biggest priority in the world, lol.
Also... I'm working on getting that Clip, if I have to I might just buy one... 67$ would still be cheaper than going out to buy a Nexus (from what I hear those are the easiest to Root). This clip would work with a GSM device right? That's how it does it's thing, by plugging into the SIM slot?

[Q] "low storage space" (but actually not?)

When I boot up my phone, the first thing it says that there's not enough space to complete some kind of action(see attached picture below). I have more than 2GB free space on sdcard and almost 6GB free space on external sd, even in file system root I have 1gb/2gb space.
I have cm10.
what does it mean? what does it want? and why does it says that? and what "action" does it talk about??
I wouldnt care if it will be just this message,but since it started this, the phone seems to be more unstable(sometimes it loses wifi/cell signal,have to press lock button 3 times to wake up,and stuff..), so I decided to make a clean reinstall anyway, but it would be great if some of u had any ideas what causes this

I've experienced something similar. I use to mount the storage on my win7 laptop and use to copy/delete files from them. Suddenly it was not letting me copy anymore telling me that the storage is out of space and when i saw it it showed free space which got me confused.
So i went ahead and set windows to show all hidden files and OS files. On the storage there was a "recycle bin" having 1.6 gb of data . I deleted the folder and all was fine.
Maybe your's is a completely different issu,e but you can check for the above.

ninthsense said:
I've experienced something similar. I use to mount the storage on my win7 laptop and use to copy/delete files from them. Suddenly it was not letting me copy anymore telling me that the storage is out of space and when i saw it it showed free space which got me confused.
So i went ahead and set windows to show all hidden files and OS files. On the storage there was a "recycle bin" having 1.6 gb of data . I deleted the folder and all was fine.
Maybe your's is a completely different issu,e but you can check for the above.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hm, I set it to show all hidden and "protected os files" (I have windows 8 on my netbook), but no "recycle bin" can be seen.. :S maybe I'm missing some more options to show that, or looking in the wrong place

Storage space low, sizes don't add up

Hey everyone,
Would it be possible for someone to help me figure out where my storage space has gone? I seem to have only about 500MB left on my internal memory, but the things using space don't add up to that and neither does checking the folder sizes. I'll post the picture of my storage map. I've been trying to figure out what is going on, but I'm stumped. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda app

hungry4cheese said:
Hey everyone,
Would it be possible for someone to help me figure out where my storage space has gone? I seem to have only about 500MB left on my internal memory, but the things using space don't add up to that and neither does checking the folder sizes. I'll post the picture of my storage map. I've been trying to figure out what is going on, but I'm stumped. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Find a better app that actually lists folders and file sizes, i uses 'Storage Analyser' from the play store. This should help you narrow down where the culprit is (or confirm androids report).

hungry4cheese said:
Hey everyone,
Would it be possible for someone to help me figure out where my storage space has gone? I seem to have only about 500MB left on my internal memory, but the things using space don't add up to that and neither does checking the folder sizes. I'll post the picture of my storage map. I've been trying to figure out what is going on, but I'm stumped. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ES File Explorer also has a tool to analyze the storage, Upper left globe>Tools>SD Card Analyst :good:

drx895 said:
ES File Explorer also has a tool to analyze the storage, Upper left globe>Tools>SD Card Analyst :good:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
my drives works perfectly, get it now on the Play Store

Thanks for all the replies! So went ahead and ran the SD tool in es and ran the storage analyzer tool as well. Very bizarre data: es reports free space of 1.36gb and I added up literally all the files listed and got about 5.8gb used on the storage card while es reports 10.68gb used. So I went ahead and ran storage analyzer which shows a whopping 7.27gb free. Taking the full size of the memory 12gb - 7.27gb actually gives the sizes of the files added up manually. System storage reports about the 1.36gb free. Any further ideas?
Edit - I forgot to mention I'm running paranoidandroid 3.99 rc2 on this s3.
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda

hungry4cheese said:
Thanks for all the replies! So went ahead and ran the SD tool in es and ran the storage analyzer tool as well. Very bizarre data: es reports free space of 1.36gb and I added up literally all the files listed and got about 5.8gb used on the storage card while es reports 10.68gb used. So I went ahead and ran storage analyzer which shows a whopping 7.27gb free. Taking the full size of the memory 12gb - 7.27gb actually gives the sizes of the files added up manually. System storage reports about the 1.36gb free. Any further ideas?
Edit - I forgot to mention I'm running paranoidandroid 3.99 rc2 on this s3.
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How many applications do you have installed? Also, how much data are they all taking up? The SIII is very strange as opposed to my previous device. As you know, we have 16GB devices. 4GB are unusable. Every application you installs to the internal SD card, as well. Meaning you have less space for more things. Very poorly managed, but what can you do? Unless partition sizes are updated and allocated in a better way, there is no way around this. So depending on how many applications you have installed and the data that they are taking up, that could give you the answer to your problem. Also, check the Download folder on the internal storage. Not sure how much you download, but I find a lot of stuff in there that takes up space. Especially ROMs, GAPPs packages, et cetera.
One more thing that you can do if all else fails is reinstall your ROM from a clean wipe. Not sure if you dirty flash or anything but if so, you are leaving files on your device that take up storage. So if the above does not help, try this and it should help you out. Wipe data, cache, dalvik cache, format data, system, and cache and then install everything.
Hope this helps you out and if not, let me know and I will see if I can come up with anything else. If I am a broken record and you know all of what I said, disregard and sorry for wasting your time. But again, hope I was able to help out.
Asphyxiation: to cause to die or lose consciousness by impairing normal breathing, as by gas or other noxious agents; choke; suffocate; smother.
(from Greek α- "without" and σφύξις sphyxis, "heartbeat")