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WiFi Password Revealer becomes an all-in-one toolkit!
09/12/2021 at 09:45 • 0 commentsAll through this project I was "forced" to use the sluggish Galaxy Tab 3 a lot and was really fed up with how slow it was. Besides mounting a consumer grade tablet with a degradable battery to the wall and expecting it to last for the lifetime of the apartment this is another caveat - the tablet came preloaded with so much stuff that any additional apps, even if lightweight, were constantly getting killed while in the background and after a few weeks of uptime the tablets would become so slow regular reboots were needed. If only the smart home supplier would have disabled at least some of them on each tablet before installing them... but some of the apps could not be removed or disabled by the user and one could not expect a supplier to go so far as to root the tablets anyway, right?
I added a reboot scheduler to my app with a suggested frequency of 1 week.
But the one thing that made the most impact was when I decided to disable all packages except for the essentials. To my app I added a Debloat and Rebloat options and painstakingly compiled a blacklist of package names which could be safely disabled:
- First on the list were all the applications and games which came preinstalled - I just made my way through the application list in the Settings app.
- Then I came for Google and Samsung services. There were a lot and they were completely unnecessary as the tablet did not have internet access or was ever meant to be used beyond the smart home apps anyway.
- I left the core system packages alone, also of course did not disable FactoryTest.apk and just left the File manager, Samsung Browser and smart home apps.
After doing the umpteenth TWRP backup restore to get to the baseline and executing the Debloat command and rebooting, the tablet booted up much quicker than never before! And the RAM consumption has shown a dramatic incerase of free resources as well:
Apps blacklisted: 114 (see bloat.xml in this project's files), tablet boot time reduced from 45 seconds to 25! Free memory increased from 350 MB to 450+ MB.
The app was now ready. The neat thing about the high-rise internal network was that even though it was mainly used for IP intercom/weather forecast communication, I could configure up my WiFi access point/router so that port 80 went through to a Raspberry Pi web server connected to it. That way my neighbors just had to open the Browser app on their tablets, enter my apartment's local IP address and sideload the toolkit APK. I even made a step-by-step guide with screenshots.
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A sense of accomplishment
09/12/2021 at 10:19 • 0 comments💡💡 PROTIP: To experience this exciting story of self-discovery and why I hated chocolate at some point, read through the project logs starting with the oldest:
https://hackaday.io/project/181646/logs?sort=oldest
With my toolkit app every apartment can now:
- Backup the previously undisclosed WiFi password - I advised everyone to do it ASAP before the 8 years old tablets fail completely
- Considerably speed up their aging tablets by removing everything except for the smart control apps
- For good measure, one can schedule an automatic tablet reboot to keep it in shape - using these two methods the aging tablets will be able to work for a bit longer
- With the WiFi password for each apartment now revealed to its owners, one can go and get a new tablet model and reinstall all the smart home apps on it when they choose to do so - I upgraded mine to the Galaxy Tab A7 Wi-Fi SM-T500.
And all that with a simple APK sideload via internal network. No changes were made to it and every homeowner can decide whether to use my app. Getting limited root access happens within seconds after the first app launch and is completely automated in the background and doesn't even require a reboot or removing the tablet from its wall mount.
There have been no reports of issues and it feels great knowing I could share my enthusiast hobby findings with others.