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.
Sounds like malware. Could be carrier-installed malware if you bought your phone directly from a carrier (which is why I’ll always go SIM only, fuck carrier firmware), could also be a virus. Either way, it’s nestled its way into your system partition, otherwise it wouldn’t have background install permissions, and that’s generally Not Good.
I doubt an app that installs trash will be required for your phone to work right. Malware often picks names like these to hide their illicit intent. However, if it’s part of your system ROM, you may not be able to disable it; the system may re-enable it against your will.
What are you using to uninstall it? I use Canta from F-Droid and it usually provides a short description of most apps and why you should or shouldn’t uninstall them.
I actually can’t uninstall it but I just using my phone’s settings app and either remove or disable it depending on what that phone allows me to do. Canta seems pretty complicated to use but I’ll try it and see what it tells me.
Ok I figured out that you don’t actually have to setup Shizuku to use Canta. The only problem is that Canta doesn’t provide a description for Mobile Services. It just provides the package name, which I searched for online, but the only thing I can find is that it’s specific to Tracfone devices.
Disable it and find out. It’s easy enough. You can reenable it if it breaks something.
I’d try that but I don’t want to end up finding out that disabling it permanently disables my phone’s service. My phone’s service is through Tracfone and they are the developers of the app.
That is extremely unlikely
Yes but it’s still possible and I have yet to see someone mention that they were able to disable it and still use their phone service.
It won’t.
Or at least it really shouldn’t. I can’t imagine that happening. I wouldn’t hesitate to do it on my own phone.
I would try but I don’t want to disable something if I don’t know for sure that it’s safe to disable.
Disabling something on your phone will have no impact on your account.
Without knowing the phone, and the exact package name, we have no idea what this is.
Get the Universal Android Debloat Utility, it’s pretty good at letting you know what can be disabled.
I forgot to mention these in my previous comment but I’ve added some information about the app in my post. As for that app that you mentioned, I’ve never used ADB commands before and I don’t want to risk bricking my phone, so I don’t know if I’m going to use it.
It’s not the account that I’m worried about. It’s hard for me to explain what I’m actually concerned about. I guess an example would be that the SIM card becomes invalid or something. One of the phones where I disabled Mobile Services has an effectively permanent error at the top of the screen that says “invalid SIM card”.
There’s at least one way to reverse it, by wiping the phone clean during a total reset, like what you would do if you sell the phone.
I would consider doing that but I’d rather not have to go through the process of re-downloading all my apps and re-customizing my phone just because I disabled a potentially important app.
