App Limit on Sprint Hero

[Guest jmanley]

Paul - can you sticky this maybe until Android 2.1 comes out? I think it can answer a lot of questions for people

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Apparently there's an app limit on the HTC CDMA devices (Eris suffers too).

From what I've gathered, people who haven't rooted their phone report that this limit is somewhere around 70. As a matter of fact, what I've seen is that people report 70 as the limit after applying the MR patch, while people a few more than 70 can be installed before the MR. I'm assuming that the MR must have either

1. created the problem
   
2. lowered the limit
   
3. or the MR adds additional apps to the /system/app directory.
   

Also, people that have rooted their phone report that they can have 100+ apps installed which I attribute to the fact that they've removed /system/app's like Rosie, amazonmp3, etc (the variation between number of apps installed has created some interesting arguments on various forums).

Some people think the limit is between 70 and 80 but I think that is due to the MR release and the fact that some people install apps outside of the market.

As for the cause? Mostly this has been assumed to be due to the hack that HTC performed on the Android OS to make the CDMA radio work at 1.5 (which is why the Moment doesn't seem to suffer from the limitations and the Eris does).

Here's what I have found through trial and error.

The App limit has nothing to do with the number of apps installed through the market, or the number of apps in /data/app or /data/app-private or a combination of those. The app limit is the total number of APK's that are on your phone between /data/app, /data/app-private, /system/app.

On my phone, I have found that limit to be right around 186 apk files between all three directories.

I found the problem when I went to MoDaCo 2.2 and got a brazillian FC plus the radio crapped out. I tried messing around with /data/app and /data/app-private thinking it was a size issue related to the number of MB of installed apps. Then I found the threads talking about app limits and started deducing. I realized that MoDaCo 2.2 returned some of the system apps that I had already removed like amazonmp3, and all the Rosie Widgets (although I chose through the kitchen to not install Rosie, the widgets are still part of the ROM). So I went through and removed those extra apps and without touching anything in /data/app or /data/app-private, I got my phone down to 186 total installed apk files and it boots just fine.

[Guest pulser]

Paul - can you sticky this maybe until Android 2.1 comes out? I think it can answer a lot of questions for people

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Apparently there's an app limit on the HTC CDMA devices (Eris suffers too)....

(shortened quote to save space)

I know it's probably obvious, but I take it this is nothing to do with Apps2SD on the 'rooted' phones? A2SD will allow you to store many more apps on the EXT partition of the SD card than the internal memory can store. I'm sure it's nothing to do with this, but it might be worth a check. Try looking at your internal memory free indicator under Settings > SD Card & phone storage > Available space (under Internal Phone Storage).

If that seems low (below maybe 5 or 10MB, that sounds like a storage space issue, not an app limit. Funny I've not heard about this before on here or xda-dev. You might want to check, as this sounds like A2SD.

[Guest jmanley]

(shortened quote to save space)

I know it's probably obvious, but I take it this is nothing to do with Apps2SD on the 'rooted' phones? A2SD will allow you to store many more apps on the EXT partition of the SD card than the internal memory can store. I'm sure it's nothing to do with this, but it might be worth a check. Try looking at your internal memory free indicator under Settings > SD Card & phone storage > Available space (under Internal Phone Storage).

If that seems low (below maybe 5 or 10MB, that sounds like a storage space issue, not an app limit. Funny I've not heard about this before on here or xda-dev. You might want to check, as this sounds like A2SD.

Actually, there are quite a few posts on xda about it (a search on xda for app limit will show you the relevant threads).

Most of the chatter is happening over on the Sprint Community forum and the HTCWiki forums (a search on Google for the same will bring you the results).

It's a good thought about A2SD, but that's been explored before...

As you should have gathered from my post, people that have not rooted their phones are limited to 70 apps after the MR is applied (it's likely that the MR added some programs to /system/app and that's why they may have had 71 installed before the update without a problem). Since these people are having the issue without rooting their phones then it's clearly not A2SD. People that have rooted their phones are reporting up to 100 apps (I myself has 105 installed but didn't see the problem until applying MoDaCo 2.2 with all the widgets and system apps returned that I had once removed).

It has nothing to do with available space, or size of apps installed (that's been explored before also). You could install a very large app as the one that sends you over the limit, and uninstall a very small app to bring you back under the limit.

The limit has been attributed to the changes that HTC had to make to the Android system to accommodate the CDMA radio.

I think that it's also partly due to the /data/boot-cache folder that only exists on the Sprint Hero. It appears that this folder was created to contain the AndroidManifest.xml from each application installed so that the phone wouldn't have to parse all that information at boot time. I'm thinking that all these files are read into memory at boot (missing ones recreated) and the system has to index them. These have to be placed into some structure and it's likely that this structure is an array and the array is only large enough to hold a certain number of entries (or the counter is not of sufficient size to be incremented to allow all entries to be enumerated). That's why when you go over the limit, everything breaks (and not just the last one).

I appreciate your concern and attempts to help, but this is not a solvable problem by offering simple suggestions of try this and try that. The problem is held within the compiled code of Android 1.5 that is used on HTC's CDMA devices. I didn't make this post without a great deal of research and personal testing... trust me, I've tried everything possible, short of delving into the Android 1.5 code to find the cause and recompile (which may not even be possible - but I'm not interested in doing that regardless). I'm simply bringing the problem to light light to help people stop pulling their hair out and come to grips with the reality that they must limit the number of apps on their CDMA Hero (and Eris).

[Guest pulser]

Actually, there are quite a few posts on xda about it (a search on xda for app limit will show you the relevant threads).

Most of the chatter is happening over on the Sprint Community forum and the HTCWiki forums (a search on Google for the same will bring you the results).

It's a good thought about A2SD, but that's been explored before...

As you should have gathered from my post, people that have not rooted their phones are limited to 70 apps after the MR is applied (it's likely that the MR added some programs to /system/app and that's why they may have had 71 installed before the update without a problem). Since these people are having the issue without rooting their phones then it's clearly not A2SD. People that have rooted their phones are reporting up to 100 apps (I myself has 105 installed but didn't see the problem until applying MoDaCo 2.2 with all the widgets and system apps returned that I had once removed).

It has nothing to do with available space, or size of apps installed (that's been explored before also). You could install a very large app as the one that sends you over the limit, and uninstall a very small app to bring you back under the limit.

The limit has been attributed to the changes that HTC had to make to the Android system to accommodate the CDMA radio.

I think that it's also partly due to the /data/boot-cache folder that only exists on the Sprint Hero. It appears that this folder was created to contain the AndroidManifest.xml from each application installed so that the phone wouldn't have to parse all that information at boot time. I'm thinking that all these files are read into memory at boot (missing ones recreated) and the system has to index them. These have to be placed into some structure and it's likely that this structure is an array and the array is only large enough to hold a certain number of entries (or the counter is not of sufficient size to be incremented to allow all entries to be enumerated). That's why when you go over the limit, everything breaks (and not just the last one).

I appreciate your concern and attempts to help, but this is not a solvable problem by offering simple suggestions of try this and try that. The problem is held within the compiled code of Android 1.5 that is used on HTC's CDMA devices. I didn't make this post without a great deal of research and personal testing... trust me, I've tried everything possible, short of delving into the Android 1.5 code to find the cause and recompile (which may not even be possible - but I'm not interested in doing that regardless). I'm simply bringing the problem to light light to help people stop pulling their hair out and come to grips with the reality that they must limit the number of apps on their CDMA Hero (and Eris).

Thanks for the info. TBH, I haven't read much about this, as I only tend to take a glance at sprint things now and then (to see if there's anyone asking anything simple & generic I can help with), but as for these things, I can't really do much except offer sympathy. I've got way more than 70 apps (that's only counting ones I've personally installed, let alone stock ones).

I have no doubt you've tried hard to fix this. It must be pretty frustrating to have a 'crippled' GSM phone that's been soft-modded to work on CDMA. Since kernel sources are out, that may be a glimmer of hope, but I think it's still unlikely, as the array limitation you mention makes sense. I don't know what level the issue is in in the coding (If you know what I mean :)), but if it is coded in C, going out the boundaries of the array is permitted, so I could try and access element 0x2a in an array of 0x29, and no error would be returned. I'd just get the value of memory contents of 'array base location' + 0x2a, giving me some nonsense to do with something else...

So, it sounds pretty fundamental. If the sources can't help, then 2.1 is the only light I see on the horizon B)

[Guest jmanley]

So, it sounds pretty fundamental. If the sources can't help, then 2.1 is the only light I see on the horizon :)

I agree that 2.1 is the answer. I'm willing to wait.

HTC is aware of the problem, but they have not moved to fix it (I don't think the problem came apparent until December, so in all fairness, it hasn't been that long). Perhaps they're waiting until 2.1 when it's not an issue.

Like I said, I'm really just trying to get the word out so people don't think it's a MoDaCo problem, or spend fruitless days trying to fix it (like i did).

[Guest jmanley]

I found 2 apk's in /system/framework, so I guess that raises to total # of apk's on the phone to 188.