Question and Answer about Android from Stack Exchange network.

Recently these spam ads have started showing up on my phone from an app calling itself "Suggestions". I never installed this thing itself and I don't see it on the apps list.

It runs periodically throughout the day by itself. Maybe once/hour? Generally when I turn on the phone and unlock, its there. More rarely it pops up in front of the active app if I've been using the phone for a while.

Presumably it tagged along with something else I installed, but I can't recall that it started occurring at a corresponding time with any other app being added.

Generally once I minimize it, it disappears entirely.

Is there a way to identify & remove this?

The ad shown below is just an example, they vary.

While this was on the screen, I long pressed the square Android apps button to go into split screen, somehow this triggered the following site to open up:

(don't click it - just for info)

https://yourphoneboost.com/landers/external/cleaner-update/landing.html?device_name=Motorola%20o&language=en-US&device_brand=Motorola&device_model=o&uclick=17m7e8xr0&uclickhash=17m7e8xr0-17m7e8xr0-gm-sy-9z-wf0-tw3y-7a9e36#

This phone is a Motorola G4 running Android 7. The security patch level was April 1, 2018.

^{(click images for larger variants)}

In Android, it is simple to view the modified date and for any file or folder. Just about any decent file manager (such as Solid Explorer) includes this functionality.

But how do you view the creation date and time (aka timestamp) for a file or folder in Android?

On my Samsung S10 with Nova as the main launcher, I'm noticing that for a few days now I don't have a status bar when on my home screen. The status bar is there when I'm working from inside any application, but as soon as I move the the home screen, it is pulled up somehow (literally, I see it moving up and disappearing). I can easily get it back by just swiping my finger from the top of the screen just a bit downwards which is why I don't think this is a bug or the launcher somehow covering it. But I'd prefer for the status bar to remain visible all the time.

I'm really not aware of anything I have done to cause this. I might have pressed something by mistake but I did not tinker with my phone in some meaningful way.

I tried googling this but all I get is results about how to show or hide notifications or icons within the status bar. When it comes to hiding and unhiding the status bar, I could only find development examples but as mentioned, I have never developed anything on this phone, it's also not rooted.

Some help on this would be much appreciated.

I have a OnePlus 6T running Android 10 / OxygenOS 10.3.4. The problem I'm about to describe has, I believe, been present since the system upgrade to Android 10.

I started seeing these suggestions on various notifications - mainly from messaging apps; the above is a WhatsApp notification. I don't want them, and didn't have a clue how to turn them off because I didn't know what they were called.

Googling various related things ('suggestions', 'smart notifications', etc.) didn't get me any closer, but I eventually found some article on a feature that'd just debuted called 'Adaptive Notifications'. While it didn't mention the above behaviour explicitly, I figured this must've been it.

Switching them off (temporarily)

Sure enough, when I dug through my settings, found the option under Apps & notifications > Special app access > Adaptive Notifications, and switched it to 'None', these suggestions on notifications disappeared after a few minutes.

However, they periodically reappear after I apply a bunch of Play Store updates - and every time they do reappear, I find that 'Adaptive Notifications' has been re-enabled in my settings.

I'm unsure precisely what updates trigger this, but I'd hazard a guess at it being Play Services.

So, how do I stop this from happening?

I have tried to root my tablet using the one click options but wasn't successful.

Does anyone know of a way to root it?

Thank You,

So, quite often i miss the little "X" in the corner of my phone screen when trying to close an ad. It then opens in quick succession my default browser and then the play store. This process is enough to make my phone reach the end of its performance, meaning that any taps on the "Back"-Button etc. cause a few seconds of lag, causing major annoyance on my side.

Searching for solutions only yielded articles describing measures by Google reducing the likeliness of these accidental clicks by ignoring very early clicks after the ad loads etc..

But i noticed that quite often the browser opens a link starting with some kind of "ad-relay"-sounding url-names ("ad4m.at", "ad4mat.de", "ad4.adfarm1"...) and i was wondering if i could at least make my browser ask for my confirmation before sending me to the follow-up page. I am using Chrome and could not find anything like that in the settings, but i would be willing to change browsers if another one supports this feature but Chrome does not.

I would also be happy about alternative solutions to my problem, if there are any.

I have a tablet running android 4.2.2. The internal sdcard will not mount and logcat output is - failed to mount via vfat (I/O error). I used fsck_msdos and output is - ** Phase 1 - read FAT (compare skipped) Attempting to allocate 14000 KB for FAT ** Phase 2 - check cluster chains ** Phase 3 checking directories Root directory starts with free cluster Fix? yes ** Phase 4 - checking for lost files Update FATs? yes Attempting to allocate 14000 KB for FAT 1389 files, 1133632 free (2238856 clusters) ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** But I am still getting the same error from vold. Is there anything elseI should try?

Chrome - swipe to dismiss articles on home page missing answered for previous versions of Chrome. This does not work on Chrome 84.0.4147.89

Internet search and experiments didn't help. Any ideas?

Digital Wellbeing is a feature/app built in to recent Google phones and some phones with Google-licensed Android distributions, but it isn't open source, so unfortunately it doesn't seem like it would be possible to modify it and add new features. I am looking for something a little more powerful, that would allow me to, for example:

• Group a bunch of social media apps together, and have one time limit per day that covers them all as a group, rather than timing the usage of each individual app separately. For example, instead of limiting myself to 30 minutes on Twitter, 30 minutes on Facebook, and 30 minutes on Reddit, I would like to be able to limit myself to 1.5 hours in total on any "social media" app (the group of apps being definable by me, and I would define it to include Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and perhaps others). So with that "group limit", I would be able to spend, for example, 1 hour on Twitter and 30 minutes on Facebook, but then it wouldn't allow me to use any of those 3 apps for the remainder of the day.
• Disable the time limits automatically at weekends, and re-enable them at the beginning of the next week
• Disable all the time limits manually in the evening, but have them re-enabled automatically the following day, in case I forget to do so.

Is there any way I can achieve these goals?

Also, is there any way to also achieve these goals on my Windows PC, in a unified way? Right now I'm just blocking those particular websites on my PC, as a workaround. That means I can only access them on my phone, so I don't have an easy way to get around the time limits I've set up on my phone. But it would be nice to have a time limit that's shared across all of my devices.

I installed LineageOS on my OnePlus One (bacon) a few months ago. With Covid-19 lockdown it was weeks before I noticed that the SIM card isn't being detected. I thought it might be damaged, but EE sent me a replacement, and inserting it changed nothing.

Could it be an absent LineageOS driver? Is that likely? If so, where would I get it from? Perhaps there is a problem with the SIM connectors? As there is the "NO SIM card" message, I assume that no other diagnostic software can communicate with the SIM when it is in such a state.

I have a very peculiar situation/question. Below is my mom's phone, OPPO F5 to be precise. It had a broken screen a long time ago. I removed the broken screen, as it posed threat to my siblings, as it could injure them without us knowing. Then, i decided to buy a new screen from OPPO service centre to fix this problem myself. As it is now a lock down period, most/all service centres are not available. I could wait till the lock down is over, but my question is, can you use the phone, like have the screen displayed/ported to a laptop, by wired means(i have no access to the phone's applications or any other forms, as there is no touch screen to control them), to use the phone, till the lock down is over? The phone functions normally by all means, as you can see from the picture, that there is the notification light is still on. Hey Google is also working partially, as when i say it, there is vibration, but no response by the assistant. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: When i connect that phone to my laptop, it is charging but isnt detected by my laptop as a device.

I need to know the history log of system updates "ROM / OTA updates", is there any file on the device can I know this information?

I want to root a Galaxy S4, yea I know it's an old phone, but perfect for what I want to do. Problem is, once I do adb restart bootloader, the device is no longer on the adb devices list, so I cannot unlock the bootloader.

Any suggestions? I am somewhat new at this so I don't know exactly what to do. Step by step would be nice.

What for is this circle icon in taskbar?

Using Microsoft Outlook app for Android I could not add an Outlook-IMAP account on some Android tablet for some customer. However, it was no problem to add the same IMAP account to the GMail App, or some other mail Clients on the same tablet. Or to Thunderbird on Windows, even Outlook on Windows worked fine...

I wondered what the heck is going on. updated outlook on android, no change. So i setup an Test-Mail-Server and sniffed the network traffic. Turns out that my device was not talking to the Mail-Server but some Microsoft servers where... what?? got logins to my IMAP from 52.125.138.21 and 52.125.139.100. WHOIS... 52.125.0.0 - 52.127.255.255 -> Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)...

Why are they logging in to my IMAP Server with user and password... why is Andorid-Outlook telling my SECRET password to some servers @ Microsoft... and... do i have to assume they pass my credentials and all mails so some 3Letter agency? It's just stupid to transport all IMAP communication to MS and from there to the tablet.

So the question is: Is there any way to force Outlook on a Android tablet to directly communicate with the IMAP-Server? I set imap.myserver.ch:993 in the advanced settings... but this also leads to MS logging in and get all mails... still no traffic from tablet to IMAP-Server.

I'm useing Oultook Version 4.2025.3 (42025807) on a Galaxy Tab S6 Android Version 10

A little background: In my country, carriers keep sending those annoying pop-up messages (I think they're called class-0 messages?). This has been the case for a couple of years and they won't stop no matter what you do. Anyway, it wasn't a big deal with my previous phones; I just learned to ignore them.

However, with my A30s (which I've had for a few months), I'm facing a critical issue where the screen will turn on for the message and never turn off unless I close the pop-up or manually turn it off by pressing the power button. There are basically two types of those messages:

1. Ones that show up after a call is ended (very annoying but avoidable if I remember to close the message after ending the call):

   

2. Ones that show up randomly (sometimes at night while I'm asleep. Screen stays on overnight and drains the battery):

   

I couldn't even tell which app is responsible for displaying those messages. Here's what I've tried:

• Checked the permissions for the Messages app and the Phone app to see if there's something that controls this.

• Disabled the "draw over other apps" permission for the Messages app.

• Installed Google's Messages app and set it as default (since I can't uninstall or disable the main one).

• I also checked the permissions for the "SIM toolkit" app but there were none. I tried disabling the notifications but the option was grayed out.

None of the above helped.

Does anyone know how to get rid of these messages?

Note: I want to avoid rooting the device or installing a custom rom.

I tried reporting this to Samsung but they weren't very helpful.

How can I see which location has the most reviews/ratings in a given area on the Google Maps Android application?

Using the "Top Rated" filter doesn't sort by number of reviews/ratings:

I am helping an older relative transfer data to a replacement phone. Both the old and new phones are Samsung Galaxy J3 Eclipses. Here's a screenshot I took of the original phone home screen. Note the top row appears to be a width of 4 grid slots, and the next two rows have 3 apps each:

This is desirable for both the large icons and to avoid information overload. It's obviously possible, but looking through the settings I only see 4x4, 4x5 and 5x5 settings for the grid layout. How can I replicate the previous layout?

my phone has fallen and it cannot boot. The only accessible thing is fastboot, but even there I cannot flash TWRP.

When I try to flash TWRP 3.1.1 or 3.1.0 I get:

>fastboot.exe flash recovery twrp.img
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
sending 'recovery' (21100 KB)...
OKAY [  0.483s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (status read failed (Too many links))
finished. total time: 0.544s

The phone is unable to boot at all. So adb is out of question.

Additional info that may help:

>fastboot.exe getvar all
(bootloader) version:
(bootloader) token:OrhCgsF/c0ZJ0PDtn3UZAR4A
(bootloader) sec_boot:TRUE
(bootloader) variant: eMMC
(bootloader) secure:yes
(bootloader) version-baseband:
(bootloader) version-bootloader:
(bootloader) display-panel:
(bootloader) off-mode-charge:0
(bootloader) charger-screen-enabled:0
(bootloader) max-download-size: 0x20000000
(bootloader) partition-type:cache:ext4
(bootloader) partition-size:cache:       0x18000000
(bootloader) partition-type:userdata:ext4
(bootloader) partition-size:userdata:    0x683bfbe00
(bootloader) partition-type:system:ext4
(bootloader) partition-size:system:      0x78000000
(bootloader) soc_id:251
(bootloader) serialno:10adc264
(bootloader) kernel:lk
(bootloader) product:MSM8992
all:
finished. total time: 0.217s

From this message I believe the storage chip is done for but you never know.

The phone claims to be unlocked (it should be as I use custom ROM). Physically there does not appear to be any damage, but when battery is connected it does not start at all.

I wanted to use TWRP ability provide data through MTP. There is TWRP installed, but it was accessible by updater application where was option to reboot to TWRP. So TWRP should be already there. But when pressing volume down button during boot I get only to fastboot.

Is there any way how to get at least to my data or is the phone completely done?

EDIT:

Tried advice from Robert in comments to directly boot TWRP.

>fastboot.exe boot twrp.img
downloading 'boot.img'...
OKAY [  0.500s]
booting...
FAILED (status read failed (Too many links))
finished. total time: 1.150s

Also advice from alexcs in comments does not yield any results. The phone cannot boot to recovery.

I try to be able to stop USB tethering.

I tried:

adb shell am stop com.android.settings/.TetherSettings # Unknown command: stop
adb shell am kill com.android.settings/.TetherSettings # nothing
adb shell service call connectivity 33 i32 0 s16 text  # works

Latest works, but I don't know if it's very reliable like am commands

Related, but the opposite, Is it possible to activate the "USB Tethering" Android setting from the command line?