My phone is a Blu Life One X, with Android 6.0. (It is 6.0, not 6.0.1) Originally came with Android 5, and they finally updated it to 6.0 last summer. Service provider is Ting, which uses Sprint's network. Got 3 annoying unresolved probs with it.
1st problem:
Two days ago, a notification popped up and when I touched it, up came a scare message that my phone might be at risk and I should visit this website: mobile-up-to-date.site, which currently has an IP address of 104.31.88.197. Checking, I find that site is very new. Yeah, shows all the signs of a scam.
Then this morning, an ad for a pedometer popped up in my notifications. The app responsible for this and the first notification is supposedly a system app, Android Tools 3.1.2.312. Checking its settings, the only one that looks like it might have a bearing is "Allow peeking", which was on, but now I've turned it off. The name "Android Tools" is so generic, searches don't find anything specific.
I've sideloaded a few apps from various websites that provide apks. Maybe they aren't trustworthy and I shouldn't have. Could well be where this mysterious Android Tools 3.1.2 came from, sneakily bundled with a legit app. Which of those sites are known pushers of malware?
2nd problem:
To me, the big reason to allow the upgrade to 6.0 was the visual voicemail. That worked for a short while, and then 2 months ago it just vanished. I had the 4 icons on the phone screen, the star, clock face, people, and tape reel. Now the tape reel is just gone, and so is the visual voicemail. Took me a while to figure this out, as at first, I thought I'd misremembered where voice mail was. Others have encountered this problem, and say they restored it by clearing memory, restarting the phone. Didn't work for me. What the heck happened? Did Ting remove it? Does this Android feature have a bug? A system update went wrong? A virus?
3rd problem:
I don't want to use cellular data. Costs more money to allow it. Of course, the upgrade from 5 to 6 ignored my settings and turned cellular data back on, so I got dinged for a month before I learned of it and shut it off again.
But this causes several difficulties. I can't view attachments to text messages, not even the little ones that are just slightly longer text messages turned into files to get around that miserable 140 character limit.
The other annoyance with this is the way Android is designed to make it hard to keep cellular data off. Who is my phone for, me or the service provider?? So I have found 2 settings that keep cellular data shut down, but they leave 2 permanent notifications on my screen: "Background data restricted. Touch to remove restriction", and "Cellular data limit reached. Data paused for rest of cycle." I set the data limit to 0 bytes. The background restriction notice is especially evil in its design. There's no way to get rid of those messages within the system, seems I have to use a 3rd party app to edit a system configuration file, which, guess what? Doesn't seem to exist! Maybe it's hidden, or maybe it really does not exist. So much for Google's "don't be evil", eh?
Bad enough having to deal with the possibility of malware, but when you also can't trust the hardware manufacturer, creator of the OS, or the service provider either, I'm seriously considering walking away from smart phones.
1st problem:
Two days ago, a notification popped up and when I touched it, up came a scare message that my phone might be at risk and I should visit this website: mobile-up-to-date.site, which currently has an IP address of 104.31.88.197. Checking, I find that site is very new. Yeah, shows all the signs of a scam.
Then this morning, an ad for a pedometer popped up in my notifications. The app responsible for this and the first notification is supposedly a system app, Android Tools 3.1.2.312. Checking its settings, the only one that looks like it might have a bearing is "Allow peeking", which was on, but now I've turned it off. The name "Android Tools" is so generic, searches don't find anything specific.
I've sideloaded a few apps from various websites that provide apks. Maybe they aren't trustworthy and I shouldn't have. Could well be where this mysterious Android Tools 3.1.2 came from, sneakily bundled with a legit app. Which of those sites are known pushers of malware?
2nd problem:
To me, the big reason to allow the upgrade to 6.0 was the visual voicemail. That worked for a short while, and then 2 months ago it just vanished. I had the 4 icons on the phone screen, the star, clock face, people, and tape reel. Now the tape reel is just gone, and so is the visual voicemail. Took me a while to figure this out, as at first, I thought I'd misremembered where voice mail was. Others have encountered this problem, and say they restored it by clearing memory, restarting the phone. Didn't work for me. What the heck happened? Did Ting remove it? Does this Android feature have a bug? A system update went wrong? A virus?
3rd problem:
I don't want to use cellular data. Costs more money to allow it. Of course, the upgrade from 5 to 6 ignored my settings and turned cellular data back on, so I got dinged for a month before I learned of it and shut it off again.
But this causes several difficulties. I can't view attachments to text messages, not even the little ones that are just slightly longer text messages turned into files to get around that miserable 140 character limit.
The other annoyance with this is the way Android is designed to make it hard to keep cellular data off. Who is my phone for, me or the service provider?? So I have found 2 settings that keep cellular data shut down, but they leave 2 permanent notifications on my screen: "Background data restricted. Touch to remove restriction", and "Cellular data limit reached. Data paused for rest of cycle." I set the data limit to 0 bytes. The background restriction notice is especially evil in its design. There's no way to get rid of those messages within the system, seems I have to use a 3rd party app to edit a system configuration file, which, guess what? Doesn't seem to exist! Maybe it's hidden, or maybe it really does not exist. So much for Google's "don't be evil", eh?
Bad enough having to deal with the possibility of malware, but when you also can't trust the hardware manufacturer, creator of the OS, or the service provider either, I'm seriously considering walking away from smart phones.
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