[Nook Touch Android Development] nmyshkin:
10-3-21: As of late September 2021, Google has denied login access to devices older than Android 3 (Honeycomb). That pretty much puts the kibosh on the presence of GApps on the NST/G. You get login errors for existing accounts every time you connect to WiFi. Even Maps misbehaves. If you have a pre-GApps backup you can get rid of GApps easily. If not...I'll be working on a removal strategy and will post it in this thread when I get it done. I have removed all the linked downloads and instructional material from this post. No point encouraging people to mess us their devices. It really is over.

Removing GApps from your NST/G

The easiest way to do this, as mentioned above, is to revert to a pre-GApps backup. If you have one that does not mean you would be happy to go back there because a lot may have been done since then. That is my case, so here's a guide to manual removal. You'll need a good file manager with root access (ES File Explorer is what I used) and you may want sqlite, although I don't think it is absolutely needed. More on that later.

1. Navigate to /system/app. Remove this entire list of apks (you may not have all of them, but remove those you do). If your file manager allows you to multi-select files for an operation, I encourage you to do so. Otherwise, at least one of the removals is likely to cause a soft reboot.

GoogleApps

GoogleBackupTransport (may cause soft reboot)

GoogleCheckin

GooglePartnerSetup

GoogleSettingsProvider

GoogleSubscriberFeedsProvider

gtalkservice

Maps

NetworkLocation

SetupWizard

Street

Vending

2. Navigate to /system/framework and remove:

com.google.android.gtalkservice.jar

com.google.android.datamessaging.jar

(you can also remove the jar file related to Maps, if you wish, but this is one of the files needed to run any of the Tasker-generated apps I have made, so I left it. It does nothing if you leave it there, but Tasker--or a "kid" app--always looks for it and will not install without it.)

3. Navigate to to /system/etc/permissions and remove:

com.google.android.gtalkservice.xml

com.google.android.datamessaging.xml

(same deal as above on the xml file related to Maps)

4. Navigate to /data/system/sync. Inspect the file "accounts.xml". It's just plain text, so try to do this on your device but otherwise copy it out to your PC to have a look at it. It should be "empty", looking like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes' ?>

If there's anything else there, delete it until your file looks like above. Be sure to save any changes.

Delete "pending.bin" if it exists.

[Wishing you just reverted to a pre-Gapps backup yet?]

5. Navigate to /data/data and remove all the folders listed. Again, you may not have every one of these, but remove those you do. Note, if you installed either Maps or Street as

user

apps, these can just be uninstalled with the App Manager.

com.android.setupwizard

com.android.vending

com.google.android.apps.gtalkservice

com.google.android.apps.maps

com.google.android.apps.backup

com.google.android.apps.gm

com.google.android.apps.googleapps

com.google.android.apps.location

com.google.android.apps.partnersetup

com.google.android.apps.providers.gmail

com.google.android.apps.providers.settings

com.google.android.apps.providers.subscribedfeeds

com.google.android.apps.servercheckin

com.google.android.street

6. Navigate to /data/dalvik-cache and remove all the files there corresponding to ALL of the apks and jars you removed in steps 1 and 2.

7. Reboot.

After I had done all of this I was surprised to see zero-byte "ghosts" in the App Manager for the system apps I had removed (and in the user app section!). So I went through and "uninstalled" them all. You cannot, in case you are wondering, just change the filter on the App Manager so you can see the system apps and uninstall them that way. There is no "uninstall" option for system apps.

Optional

When GApps was installed, patched copies of two files: services.jar and framework.jar were copied onto the device (/system/framework). These were patched mainly to establish device ID's and allow the SetupWizard to work. These minor changes seem to have no other effects. You may find that during GApps installation the original files were renamed as "service.jar.gappsorig" or similar. If that's the case, you could delete the patched ones and rename the old "gappsorig" ones. If you do this, you should delete the entries in the dalvik-cache as well and reboot.

Finally, accounts.db still holds information about whatever Google accounts you had on the device. Again, this probably is not really an issue. If you want to remove these entries, you will need a copy of sqlite3. Check /system/bin. If you have it, you're good to go. Otherwise, you need to download a copy, move it into /system/bin, set permissions to rwx r-x r-x and reboot. Sqlite is accessed within the adb shell. So establish an adb connection with your device (USB or WiFi, doesn't matter) and execute the following:

adb shell

sqlite3 /data/system/accounts.db "DELETE from accounts WHERE name LIKE myacct@gmail.com;"

.q

reboot

Of course you substitute your account for "myacct".