[TIL] Teaching Aging Smartphones New Tricks (or How An Android Boot Loop Caused My Learning Frenzy)

Today I learned (ok, it was actually last night) two very important things about my trusty Samsung Galaxy S4 phone:

1. The main Facebook app was eating around 1GB of internal storage space
2. The Facebook messenger app was also eating up around 800 MB of the same internal storage space

So almost 2 GB of internal storage space wasted by Facebook apps. I really did not like that, as it was quite a lot, relative to the 9 GB of internally available space for the device.

I tried moving both apps to the external 32 GB SD card first, but the system refused to do so. What again? OK, I'll have to deal with that later, now give me my internal storage space back, Facebook!

I also learned that by uninstalling both apps, the data was left behind, still residing on my phone's internal storage, eating up Gigabytes in the most relaxed manner.

The data could not be deleted via any file manager, not without having root access. Which I didn't have at the time.

Onwards on the learning chain, I learned how to connect to my device via ADB (part of the Android SDK) and how to manually remove leftover data.

But first, I used Kingo ROOT to ... well, root my phone. Bad idea.

A huge a-ha moment followed. Although I was able to use ADB and remove the problematic folder (com.facebook.katana), after I rebooted the device, it got stuck in a boot loop and never got to the home screen.

Bummer.

Lesson to learn: Thou shalt not root a device to delete Facebook apps' leftovers . Happy times! (NOT).

This caused me to seek new knowledge on how to unbrick an android device (well, technically it was only soft-bricked).

I found out that the S4 (and probably any other Android device) has a recovery mode. Yay!

I soon found out I could not make it boot again via the standard recovery mode. Boo!

Fast forward 3 hours, I taught my (slowly but surely) aging Galaxy S4 some new tricks:

1. I installed TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) which is an open source recovery project that adds some quite interesting features at boot-up time. It looks like this:

   (image source)

2. I flashed the newest Android 7.0 ROM (Nougat + GApps). How awesome is that? I am really happy to have the newest Android version out there. From what I've read online, it won't be pushed very soon to Galaxy S4 devices via the official channels, if ever. Happy happy, joy joy.

I was also happy to discover the fresh OS install takes up only 300MB out of my 9GB of internal storage. Now that is a huge storage space saver. Impressed I am!

Well, learning didn't stop here. I suspect my external SD card is corrupted. The device freezes every time I insert the card into it, right after notifying me that the card is not working.

Anyhow, learning never ends. Just wanted to share this experience.

Careful with that rm -rf, ciao!