[EVO 4G General] NxNW:
We all know the Sprint Visual Voicemail (VVM) app is not AOSP and is never going to be part of Cyanogen. Currently with CM 7.0.0, the conventional advice is to just quit using it and switch to Google Voice. Anyone who insists on trying to stay with Sprint's VVM app is then advised to follow the steps given here: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=982966 .

The usual caveat is you will have to be OK with receiving text messages from Sprint (appearing to come from "9016" ) every time you get a voicemail if you want voicemail notifications to work. So in addition to getting VM notifications you *do* want, you now get SMS notifications you *don't* want.

And of course the usual workaround for *this* annoyance is to install a SMS filtering app that suppresses notifications of any SMS coming from 9016.

Redlist seems to be a popular choice. It's free and it's small and it's simple to guess how to set it up. I say 'guess' because I couldn't find a manual for Redlist and no one really wrote out how to use it for this purpose anywhere that I could find. For the record, here's what I recommend: add 9016 to your "Redlist". Then IN REDLIST SETUP turn OFF "Redlist notifications" while turning ON "Message notifications" . Then IN THE STOCK MESSAGING APP SETTINGS turn OFF "Notifications".

And in most conversations describing this workaround, this is where the advice stops.

The problem with *this* workaround is now you will see the notification icon provided by the *Redlist* app, not the stock MMS app, every time you get a legitimate text message that you *do* want to know about. The Redlist icon is a black envelope with a faint light colored outline. Maybe this works in the original light-background status bar in previous AOSP builds, but it's darn near impossible to see with Android 2.3 / CM7. And in general it's a little crude compared to the gray smiley balloon icon that comes with the stock MMS app, and, well, it's JUST NOT VANILLA ENOUGH FOR ME.

I mean, I understand Redlist is aimed at people who are trying to get *away* from the features of the stock MMS app. But I'm not. I think the stock app is fine. I'm only using Redlist for one simple thing: make 9016 texts go away when using Sprint VMM. For the rest of my phone experience, I just want it to be vanilla Gingerbread. (I'm one of those guys who even replaced the ADWlauncher in CM7 with the frank707 vanilla Gingerbread launcher as described here http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=981167 .)

So I really wanted to have Redlist use the stock notification icon.

I discovered I am not alone: one of the more widely cited threads involving generic APK hacking ( http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=503007 ) was in fact started by a person who wanted to replace a 3rd party SMS app's notification icon (although of course he was doing it for a reason completely unrelated to the Sprint VVM workaround).

So, emboldened by some breadcrumbs I picked up there, I decided to try hacking the Redlist "apk" to replace its black envelope icon with the stock icon.

It turns out you don’t even need apk hacking skillz for this: Redlist is not an apk. The Redlist app you download from the Android market lives on your phone in the form of a plain old .zip file (as opposed to an .apk file containing a META-INF folder with signatures that need to be recreated if you modify the contents of the .apk).

So all I had to do was locate the stock icon's .png and replace the one inside the Redlist app. The steps I followed are below.

These steps assume you have a way of mounting your /system partition read-write (either from your PC using ADB or through an app on your phone like Root Explorer or, if you're really lazy and cheap like me, EStrongs File Explorer (which *can* be given root access when installed on CM7, unlike Astro, and is free, unlike Root Explorer)).

Upshot:

The Redlist icon in question is at /system/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip/res/drawable-mdpi/new_message.png .

Replace it with the stock icon at /system/app/Mms.apk/res/drawable-hdpi/stat_notify_sms.png .

Detailed steps:

On the phone…

(Optional sanity check: Send yourself a test SMS to confirm that you are seeing the old Redlist black envelope icon before proceeding.)

Copy /system/app/Mms.apk to /sdcard

Copy /system/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip to /sdcard

With both phone and PC…

Connect phone to PC as "USB storage" and transfer the two files above to your PC desktop.

On the PC…

Rename Mms.apk to Mms.zip

Inside Mms.zip , locate the icon file at /res/drawable-hdpi/stat_notify_sms.png and copy it to your desktop

(You could also grab stat_notify_mms.png- they seem to be the same icon, and Redlist only uses one either way.)

Rename this file new_message.png

Inside com.linnor.RedList-1.zip , replace the file res/drawable-mdpi/new_message.png with the one on your desktop.

(Note the path says [M]dpi, not the usual [H]dpi. There *is* an hdpi folder, but that's not the one Redlist uses for notification icons.)

With both phone and PC…

Connect phone to PC as "USB storage" and replace /sdcard/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip with the one you modified in the previous step

On the phone…

(Optional safety step: Rename /system/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip to /system/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip.bak before proceeding.)

Copy /sdcard/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip to /system/data/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip (replacing the original if you skipped the safety step above).

Reboot phone. (I actually didn't try it *without* rebooting; maybe this is unnecessary, but it seemed like the intelligent next step.)

(Optional sanity check: Send yourself a test SMS to confirm you are now seeing the stock icon as desired.)

(Optional clean-up step: Remove /sdcard/Mms.apk and /sdcard/com.linnor.RedList-1.zip as they are no longer needed.)

I hope this all makes sense and brings some peace to those irritated by the Redlist icon.

(Before I conclude, I also want to mention the other issue I have with using Redlist for the Sprint VVM workaround is that for texts coming from people in your address book, you no longer see their names in the notification area, just digits. But that's a topic for another day...)

I hope someone closely connected with the CM7 or AOSP developer community will put out the word that this whole VVM drama is an ongoing issue that Sprint subscribers (and possibly others) are not going to stop asking about. I'm sure all these workarounds could be rendered unnecessary with just a few lines of code. I could envision adding one Redlist-like feature to the MMS app in CM7 : just add one MMS preference that allows users to suppress text *notifications* from one (or more) number(s). Just a thought...