A while ago (> year iirc) I installed "player fm" so I could listen to podcasts. Never used it. I opened it last week, and while trying to remember why I installed it (thinking "FM" === "music"), unintentionally* subscribed to a bunch of things by clicking on a seemingly generic news link. So it informed me that it would now start downloading crazy amounts of stuff every time I'm connected to wifi. A couple of days later when I noticed it doing exactly that, I tried to delete it. It doesn't want to be deleted. Instead, attempting to delete it causes my nexus 7/Android 5.1.1 tablet to reboot after a lengthy time (>10-minutes), which I've tried 3-4 times always with same result: long wait, reboot, no delete. :C The stupid app is only ~30MB. It does not have "device administrator" permissions.

Any pro tips on how to force-delete an app from an unrooted deviced?



*this may have been facilitated by alcohol

**oh, and I did figure out how to turn off the downloads, so there's that.

What method are you using to try and remove it?
Is it rooted?

It's not rooted. I'm going through settings/apps/click on the app & choosing "uninstall".

The tablet seems to be spontaneously rebooting now every hour or so. I'm going to try and get into safe mode and see if I can delete the app there.

I think it's possible to delete apps using adb if you have any idea how to use that?

I have adb set up, but I think I'll try safe mode first.

Safe mode did it in about 2 seconds.

Then I was unable to delete any other apps, and it rebooted itself.
 (pyfitg)

Hasn't rebooted since the app delete/reboot couple of hours ago. I installed "Bootlog Uptime" so I can track whether it is rebooting when I'm not looking. AFAIK this is/was completely new behavior (though it has spontaneously rebooted a few times since I got it ~3-years ago, usually after an OTA update).

Soz (((Smiffy))), sounds like a pain in the bum. 

Reading through the post sequence, I was going to write something like 'leave it there, what's 30mb?' but or course neither I, nor you, nor any self-respecting geek would or could have ever done that.  Fuck knows how many hours - days indeed - I have spent wrangling stuff (and fucking bigger stuff up as a consequence) because it would be neater thus.

Yeah, my concern was that it was some kind of malware that had its hooks in me. Also, I was wondering if it were merely a symptom of some underlyiing issue, like old age even. Not that I would know anything about that. Anyways I got rid of it.