Sprint Silently Pushes “Drive First” Child Safety Bloatware To Android Devices – Here’s How To Find It, And Kill It
A few months back, we told you how Sprint was offering a new service for parents looking to cut down on their teens texting behind the wheel. It’s called “Drive First” and for $2 a month, parents have the ability to enable the provided Android app to lock a teen’s phone from sending/receiving text messages while the car is in motion. Great too for parents. But what about the rest of us?
Well, what has rustled the feathers of a few Sprint customers is the application has been pushed to devices — whether you signed up for the service or not — via an app in the Play Store labeled “Smart Device Manager” by Location Labs. The application is already installed on users’ devices and requires a long, long list of permissions. Like every other preinstalled app, it cannot be uninstalled (a security measure, no doubt, to prevent rebellious teens from getting rid of it).
The problem some are having is that a glitch in the Play Store is prompting users to update the app/process, exposing the software on their devices. The Smart Device Manager process will continue running in the background, sucking up precious resources, however minimal. This process can be killed by jumping into your Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Running (tab) > Smart Device Manager > Stop, but the process will just start up again moments later. The only real way to remove this application/process is if you’re a rooted user with system access, in which case — you know what to do. “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”
Carrier bloatware shouldn’t be anything new to anyone on a 2-year contract. We’ve seen OTA updates in the past where a few “bonus” carrier apps managed to slip onto our devices. But after the whole Carrier IQ privacy debacle, the last thing some Sprint users want is another 3rd party application with access to just about every permission in the book on their device. I just wanted to give you guys a heads up. Well, those of you that are a bit more anal about apps requesting loads of permissions running on your phone. Cheers.
Thanks, mmark27!