vortexal

Most of the android phones I've had came preinstalled with something called "Mobile Services". I normally remove it because it just keeps randomly installing apps and games that don't want but I've never had an active phone plan on those phones. If I disabled it from my phone, would I still be able to send and receive calls and texts?

So far the only thing I have found out is that "Mobile Services" is an app that is only preinstalled on android phones who's carrier is Tracfone.

Edit: Even though I wasn't able to get an answer, I've decided to just disable it. I wont be manually testing it and I wont be updating this post with results. I no longer care at this point and I wont be responding to anymore comments about this.

About a week ago, I tried to download one of their games but for some reason, every single game/app they ever released is completely missing from the Google Play Store. I can't even download them through my library. I tried sending them an email but they never responded. Both their social media and their website seem to be abandoned and mention nothing about their sudden disappearance. I don't think I've ever seen a developer just completely disappear like that, does anyone know what happened to them?

Also, because it's relevant to a recent movement* and I feel like mentioning it, the game I was trying to download was Lophis Roguelike:Card RPG game. I bought this game a few years ago but it didn't work on my tablet, so I added it to my backlog of android games, thinking that I could eventually try it on a different device. Seeing that this game is no longer officially available, this is a game that I payed for but never got to actually play.

*The movement I'm referring to is stopkillinggames.

I am having an issue with two different Bluetooth devices on one of my Android phone and I don't understand what's causing it because these two devices work perfectly fine on every other Android device I own. The first device is a Bluetooth mouse and apps that use the mouse directly (like either FreeDoom or Delta Touch) can only detect mouse movement when I am physically touching the screen. The other device is an 8BitDo SF30 Pro and apps can detect everything except for the D-pad and analog sticks unless I'm, once again, physically touching the screen.

Any ideas of what can cause this?

For example, if I wanted to always see rows 5, 10 and 15, as far as I can tell, I would have to freeze every row from 1 to 15. But is it possible to only freeze the specified rows so that if I scrolled down, the first four rows could be 5, 10, 15 and 20.

I've been trying on and off for the past few months to get a cursed staff but it seems like they don't drop them. I've actually fought so many of them that I've gotten at least 3 skeletal bat pet drops, which are supposed to be even rarer. I had a similar issue with ice staves where the wiki states that snow bats drop them but it seemed like they didn't and I had to get them from snowmen, even though the wiki stated that they don't drop ice staves.

I'm not sure what fixed it because I tried multiple things yesterday, but it shutdown normally last night.

I wasn't sure how to word the title but what I mean by "semi-passively productive" is something that I can have running on the phone that requires little to no interaction and is in some way beneficial to me.

What I've been doing is just using a website called Musio (one of the sister sites of Hideout TV), which is a website where you can earn points by watching videos and redeem those points for gift cards. While the amount of points I've been earning has been significantly lower than it used to be, I have other reasons why I'm looking for potential alternatives, whether it be another website or an app. It doesn't have to be a "beer money" site/app either, it's just that I'm not sure of what else there could be. The only requirement that I have is that it can work on older android devices.

Also, yes I'm aware of r/beermoney on Reddit but I don't have a Reddit account anymore and it seems like some of the posts that the wiki on r/beermoney linked to have been deleted.

If you don't know what App Watcher is, it's an app that allows you to get notified when apps on the Google Play store receive updates even if you don't have them installed.

Brave is my primary web browser but every page I visit isn't being rendered correctly at all and some pages are completely broken. I have a system backup from a few days ago but I'd prefer not to have to use it if I can. I think Brave is the only thing that was affected but I think I should try to revert the update if it's possible.

Edit: I was able to run some benchmark tests, so I don't need help with this anymore, but after running the tests, I'm pretty sure my computer is having hardware issues. I don't really have any other options, though, so I just have to deal with it.

The computer I was using stopped working and I had to switch to a different computer but despite having a significantly better GPU, games are performing only slightly better. I want to benchmark test the GPU to see if it's a potential hardware problem or if something else is causing a bottleneck.

I'm currently using Ubuntu and I want try a different distro but so far the only one I've tried was Porteus but I had an issue where Porteus wouldn't boot if it was installed on top of ext4 but would boot fine if it was installed on top of fat32, which is also another potential problem because Porteus requires a save file for persistence when using Windows filesystems. If there is a problem where my computer can't boot with an ext4 filesystem, Ubuntu doesn't have this problem because sda1/2/3 all use a different filesystem.

If I'm correct on this, would I be better off trying Porteus on ext3/2 and hoping it works or just use it with fat32 and have a separate partition formatted for ext4 to serve the same purpose as sda3 in Ubuntu and possibly store the save file (if I have the correct understanding of how save files work).

Also, I would just use NTFS but not only have I heard that it has issues with Linux, I've had issues using it with Linux, so I'm using fat32 for stability.

I usually keep the WiFi off but on my "new" phone, the WiFi adapter will randomly be on when I turn the phone on. So far I've tried the following, in order of when they show up in settings:

1. In advanced WiFi settings, I've disabled "keep WiFi on when screen is off" but it seems to completely ignore this.

2. Turned off WiFi scanning in the location settings.

3. I checked app permissions but the permission to connect to WiFi either doesn't seem to exist or it's listed as something different. (If it's listed as "change system settings", I've already disabled all of the apps that had that.)

4. I don't know if it had any impact on this issue but I did technically do a factory reset but it was for a completely different reason.

I've tried "just Googling" it but every article that pops up, either tells me to do something that my phone doesn't seem to have the options for or it tells me to do something I've already tried. The phone is an LG Rebel 4 running android 8.