Android: All you want to know

Android Information

How to Remove Unwanted Apps From Your Apps List in Google Account

In this urge of exploring Google Play Store, I got a list of over hundreds of apps in my Play Store account database. These apps were either installed on my smartphone or were installed a long time ago, though may not be present in the smartphone. Previously Google Play store always kept a track back of which apps you have installed. So even if you uninstalled an app, it would still show up in the “All” Apps list. Play Store does not allowed removing of apps from their. However i wished i could remove unwanted apps to give that list a cleaner look with only useful apps in the apps list.

Google Play Store App Updated

However, post a recent update in Google Play Store App, it though still keeps a track of apps you have installed but now you can also remove unwanted apps from this list which you are willing to remove and do not want to install later. These apps may include some buggy app or any app which you never found useful. You may keep those apps which you find useful but does not need at the moment.

This recent update from Google is loved by most of the android smartphone holders and personally by me as well. I cleared up over 100 of apps present in the list which were of no use to me and I am dead sure I am not going to use them in future. Thus I ended up with a list of only those apps I really need to know about.

Play Store App update rolled out recently and you might have got that. The best feature it brings out is that now you can remove unwanted apps.

How to remove unwanted apps all together from your All Apps list in Play store at once.

• Launch Google Play Store and tap on menu button. You will see My Apps option. Select that.
• Once you enter that you will see two option viz. Installed and All . Select All.
• You might be surprised to see the number of apps it will show. These are apps you installed from the day you have used that Gmail account with android smartphone.
• Those apps which are still installed on your system won’t show a cross mark in the corner. But those which have been uninstalled from the system will show. You can remove them one by one by clicking at the cross button and confirming that you are willing to remove them. make sure you want to remove unwanted apps from the list.
• In case you have too many of unwanted apps, Just tap and hold on each of those apps you wish to remove and then head over to the top where it shows a cross mark. It will be present just after it says ( X numbers of app selected). Tap on that and confirm that you are willing to remove them. That’s all you need to do to remove unwaanted apps in one click.

How To Format EFI Partition system

You might have always noticed that your hard disk label shows much more capacity than what you actually get. For example,  The laptop I bought few months ago came with a configuration of 1TB of hard disk. However after opening it, I saw only 931GB of available space. Though I knew that there are always some memory space which are reserved and which cannot be used but this was a lot of space.
Hence to be more sure if where the space was actually been used, I launched my Disk Management tool.
To open Disk Management Tool in windows 8 or 8.1 just type disk management and open any of the option saying create or delete partition and anything similar. In windows 7 open start menu and type in the search box Disk Management.
Universal way for all Mentioned OS, just open run and type compmgmt.msc and click ok.
Now once I opened my disk management tool, I saw two EFI partition, which I created when I once installed Ubuntu on my system. The two counted for 24GB of space. Since I was not running Ubuntu on my system anymore, The EFI partition was not doing any good to me. Hence I though to get rid of them.
Being marked as System Partition, Due to EFI type, Windows won’t allow the deletion or modification of these partitions. Hence I figured out yet another way to get rid of them. This is the simplest way I found after searching for a long time on the web and passing through a number of things which seemed a lot high-tech.

Below are the steps on how to Format EFI System Partition.

1. Launch your disk management tool to verify if you have any EFI type partition or not.
2. Make sure you verify for the correct EFI partition system which you want to delete and not the EFI partition system which contains Windows Boot Information. Anyways, even if you do, Windows won’t allow you deleting the Windows partition.
3. We will be using CMD [Command Prompt] for this as you cannot do this via the normal menu options. Hence launch RUN and type in CMD. Then click on RUN.
4. Once CMD is open. Type in DISKPART . A list of internal and external Hard Disk Connected would popup in CMD. Identify the Hard Disk which has the EFI partition system you want to delete. Once you get the number of that Disk suppose 0, Type in CMD – SELECT DISK 0.
5. Once the disk is selected, Type in LIST PART to show all the partition in the selected disk. Once it shows ups the partitions, verify for the position of the partition which you want to delete. For example if the EFI partition system is 1, then type SELECT PART 1 . For 2 type SELECT PART 2 and so on.
6. It will mention the selected partition as active. Now to delete the partition type DELETE PART OVERRIDE or you may even type DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE .
7. As already mentioned, if the partition you selected to delete does not has any boot files which is needed by OS, then it will be deleted successfully.

Once the partition is deleted, Open up your disk management tool and now the EFI partition would be showing as UNALLOCATED SPACE.
To create a new partition, right click on that space, Choose the desired option and Click OK. Once you are done creating a new partition, Launch My computer and you can see that partition listed there with other local drives.

Find My Phone App (Web Based App) – Google’s Android Device Manager

This service acts as a web based app which lets you ring your device to its max volume. Hence you can hear it loud and clear and locate its situation. Even if your device is at Vibrate or Silent mode, it will override all settings and will ring your smartphone to its maximum volume.
If you are thinking how can I find my phone with this service, here is the way for this.
Since you are using an Android Smartphone then you should be having a Gmail id which you used up to SignUp in the Play Store.
Just Follow the link Android Device Manager , and use the same email id and password to access the service. It will automatically show you the name of your smartphone which is saved with this account. (See The Picture below). Once you log in, it will automatically detect the present location of the device and present before you.

Find My Phone – Android Device Manager

The left pic shows this find my phone service trying to establish a connection with my device and the second one shows the present location of the device. It will also show the location of the device on Google Map.
There are two services offered by the web based app.
Google’s Android Device Manager Features:

Ring Feature

Ring : This is the feature about which I was talking before. It will help you ring your device to the maximum possible volume.

Wipe Feature

Wipe : This is bonus features. Suppose you lost your phone. And in case it has some personal information which you don’t want to be leaked, then you can use this service to wipe all those data from your smartphone.To use this feature you will need to enable the Factory reset option form your android smartphone. These will be asked by your smartphone the very first day, you will be registering for this service.
You can select which one of the two service are you willing to use on your android smartphone. Based on the permission you provided you can use it.

Android Device Manager Permission

Note : In case you are unavailable to track down youe phone, then this means that your phone is either out of any coverage area, or is switched.

This is not a very new kind of technology. In fact to be precise, features and services like this are available from a long time in other android apps (mostly by some of the best antivirus apps) . Not to forget the famous Find My iPhone app, which is just similar. The only thing with Android Device Manager is that this is being served the Tech Giant Google.