Happy New Year

1st January 2022. A new year, a new start.

What are your plans for the 2022 year? I’ve picked up Zombies Run again after a few years away due to its memory footprint inflating so much it wouldn’t run on my S5 without causing Android to force close other apps. It works fine on my OnePlus 9 Pro though.

Downgrading LineageOS to Android 10

LineageOS has now gone to Android 11, and like most users, I went ahead and upgraded to it. But then I started hitting lots of problems. Predominantly on location.

Android 11 changed the way location is requested and this breaks functionality in multiple apps. Ones I have noticed this issue with:

  • Just Eat
  • CityMapper
  • Google Maps (yes, surprisingly Google’s own app had trouble with locking on)

Other location apps may have also had the same issue, but I didn’t check those.

Waze did not have any issues locking on to location or tracking movement

Some non-location apps also broke. Fenix 2 (a Twitter client) and WeChat both stopped working and would not install off the Play Store, presumeably because of API differences.

I installed Plume instead (which I had previously purchased) and that installed and functioned happily.

WeChat I sideloaded by getting the apk from a mirror. That functioned okay, but could not log into Web WeChat

I decided to clean wipe and downgrade back to Android 10 (Lineage OS 17) to at least get things working again.

I formatted my SD card for Portable Storage, then took it to my laptop and saved the LOS flash zip, Open Gapps zip, and the latest Magisk.

I booted into TWRP Recovery and wiped, data, cache, system, ART and internal storage.

Switching to external storage, I then flashed LOS, OpenGapps, then Magisk.

I rebooted and let the OS do its thing until I got the welcome screen — that’s a good sign. I went through the setup but opted not to setup my Google Account yet.

Once through to the home page, I went and unlocked Developer options and enabled ADB, Local Terminal, Force Allow External Storage, and Force Close on Hold Back.

Then I plugged my phone into my pixelbook, allowed the debug connection and started up scrcpy which allows me to copy-paste text to and from the device.

I installed TitaniumBackup and the pro key so I can batch move apps to/from the storage.

The SD Card is still setup as Portable. So I formatted it as Internal. This took a few attempts as it kept erroring.

I went into Play Store and installed a few apps. A couple installed file, but the other errorred with a message:

"App requires external storage"

This was weird, I never saw that before, but checking around, I found this: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-requires-external-storage.4098673/ which describes fixing the storage permissions. I ran this:

adb shell
su
restorecon -FR /data/media/0

I reinstalled the apps again, and there were no errors. Fenix 2 installed happily this time, enhancing my suspicion of some API change breaking it on Android 11.

Also found out that Strava required Google Maps so I also had to install Google Maps.

WeChat finally did install, but was then told by the app that my account cannot use Web WeChat, and I should use WeChat for Windows or Mac….. and I’m running Linux, so both of those options are not feasible.

However, I did find this: https://github.com/qo6xup6/ubuntu-deepin-wechat which is a Wine wrapper around the Windows WeChat app. This seems to work well, although I did have to update the client using the instructions on the README.md

FitBit refused to pair with my Ionic (again — it always seems to have this trouble whenever I have to reinstall the app). I eventually resorted to factory resetting my Ionic, and re-setting it up again. It worked this time, although the pairing took a few attempts.

Surprisingly, I was then able to add my Curve card to FitBit Pay, and the SMS verification worked.

All in all, it took me from around 7am to 12:30 pm to reflash, reinstall, and setup all the apps again, and reboot to make sure the apps still worked. So around 5 hours.

Training in Quarantine – Day 306

Today’s been raining, windy, sunny, rainy again and repeat all day.

Managed to get a walk in between the rain and wind phases

Finished reinstalling my apps and had a few issues with location. Waze and Google Maps had trouble locking onto GPS and found out that even though the option to allow location “only while app is running” was available, I needed to set the permission to “at any time” otherwise they would lock on.

Citymapper had no issue

Just Eat still has issues and does not have a “at any” level for location permission, so I just use the postcode for that.

Most of the apps are now working. A few will not install from Play Store, presumably they’re not built to support Android 11 yet:

  • WeChat
  • Fenix 2

For Fenix, I went back to Plume (I had previously paid for the Premium version and that works fine). I installed GBoard so I can put gifs into my tweets again (one feature I really liked from Fenix)

WeChat, I ended up sideloading from apkmirror and it worked fine.

Training in Quarantine – Day 305

Training in Quarantine – Day 305

Decided to finally action the upgrade notification on my phone and Lineage OS wanted to update from Android 10 to Android 11.

The upgrade went off without too many issues, but I then found out Open Gapps had no package fro Android 11, meaning I had to resort to MindTheGapps — a minimal package that only allows Google Apps to work, but doesn’t actually install any. Consequently the Google Apps I had installed via OpenGapps decided to stop working as a result. I had to uninstall and reinstall everything from Google — Search, Notes, YouTube, Maps, Home, etc.

But fortunately everything else seemed to work. Camera MX decided to stop working, so I’ve gone back to CameraZoom

There seems to be a nice feature in Android 11 where if an app does not use a claimed permission after a period of time, Android will automatically remove that permission. Useful for applications which claim more permissions than they really need.

I also went round the torched fence and managed to get a pic of the new fence

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