[Upgrading, Modifying and Unlocking] harnish:
Playing with my Eve

Alrighty, before I get to the point of this post, I'll regale you with some words of warning and the tale of how I ended up where I am now.

Last night I decided to play with my eve and see if I could rip out the rogers contact app and replace it with the stock one ... that didn't go as well as I would have expected; I could no longer open the dialer or the contacts. Restoring the original Contact application, distressingly, didn't fix the problem so I figured what the hell, my phone is already screwed and I'll need to reflash anyway so let's replace the LG/Rogers Phone.apk with a stock 1.5 as well, just in case the dialer/contact apps need to be matched. Never Do This. I successfully screwed over the ability for my phone to authenticate with the Rogers network and even the home/back soft buttons stopped functioning. I suspect I may need to recompile those from the stock source I so interestingly spied above. I'm also not sure the 1.5 phone.apk I found was stock ... I am beginning to suspect someone just yanked it out of the emulator, which would explain a lot.

In any case, I reflashed with my backup and I decided to try removing some more of the applications I hadn't dare touch since I've been doing it all night anyway. One of the ones I've always wanted to remove is Mms.apk (I dislike the default SMS Messaging client). This worked wonderfully ... installed HandySMS instead and all was great until I received a text message and it didn't save it (sending was fine). Long story short, turns out there is more in Mms.apk than just the default messaging client. Reflash.

This time, I decided to give Apps2SD a try. Erased the userdata partition in flashboot and then flashed the new files. Reboot and Marvin came up telling me not to panic. Excellent. Needed that.

So I fire up adb and tell it remount system rw. Permission denied. Oh, I must have lost the Enable Root Permissions when I blanked userdata. Open the dial an punch in 3845#*620# and ... nothing. Uh oh. Try again. Try again. Alrighty, it's not just my random number switching ... 'tis okay, I can do this manually ... I open a shell and punch in su. The superuser authorization dialog appears on the screen and I say go for it ... and no root. Permission denied.

So at this point I was going to ask my big question that was the original reason for this post: Can anyone else get into the LG Hidden Menu?

However, while writing my opus, I decided to reboot the phone and it now seems happy to let me into the menu so ignore that part of the tale, unless you can't get into the LG Hidden Menu on your phone. If so, reboot. ;)

I also just replicated the issue with the Contacts.apk under the Apps2SD Firmware with a clean, unmodified userdata. Once again, things broke horribly. This time I was able to recover from it though. I suspect that part of the issue is the odex file that Contacts has. It is unusual and negates the whole classes.dex in the dalvik-cache directory. Whatever firmware they are using to install their super-duder awesome contacts application installer the instructions came from, it is obvious they started with an unmodified contacts.apk ...

So I guess my new point for this post would be that I would recommend removing the wiki entry for nuking the Rogers Contacts unless someone has managed to get the replacement to work ... and if they did, could they tell me how?