On a throwaway Samsung Galaxy with American ROM, I installed some Chinese apps. When I uninstall them, the browser opens with a specific “uninstall survey”. How that is possible? Are they exploiting some os weakness or it’s permitted by the apk uninstall API?

The bad actors are:

  • sogou keyboard
  • Tencent video
  • weibo
  • breakingcups@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    10 months ago

    I wonder if they have some sort of sister service that does the monitoring of the install status.

    • Moonrise2473OPEnglish
      41·
      10 months ago

      i have the feeling they had a permanent service running in memory like a virus just for this purpose, triggering the webpage launch when killed (maybe could listen the reason for kill?), because the device was ultraslow (old and just 1gb ram did not justifiy a 10 sec delay in screen rotation) until i uninstalled them.

      edit: but it could be it was triggered by a sister service. For example, when i uninstalled wechat (still from tencent) it did not give me the uninstall survey like i got a few minutes earlier with tencent video.

      Same for sogou keyboard, when i uninstalled sogou search i did not get the survey. So it could have been that sogou search detected that sogou keyboard was uninstalled and triggered the survey