Mimeinfo.cache - Side Effects for Stability?

General
#1

(10 III) I’ve had some issues with media files in Piepmatz Twitter client. Very frequently videos did not start, but crashed the app instead. Also, if they start, the needed a rather long time to load and stuttered at the beginning.
Annoying, but as a Sailfish user - you know…

But recently I was trying to find out why Opera-Browser permanently respawns every X minutes with a headless instance (will start another thread about this), and one of my concerns was the desktop file. So, I cleaned the desktop files in /usr/share/applications relating to the MimeType item. Especially the Android desktop files have veeeryyy long lines after “MimeType=”, but I just need a second browser for ad-free youtube… so, I removed irrelevant entries.
There was also some facebook-related stuff, IDK, → rm *. (For unexperienced users: please do NOT delete all desktop files unless you want to reflash your device anyway)

After this, the mimeinfo.cache has to be rebuilt with “update-desktop-database” (or just delete and reboot).

Now, I got notifications from APK-Pure. This happened never before. There’s no need to have this app installed, but it was there and never told me anything until now… okay, uninstalled it.

But amazingly, the Piepmatz-Issues are mostly gone. Videos are starting faster now and crash rarely, and if they do, they crash “different”.

So - my question: is my observation reasonable, on a technical level? @Ygriega told me once he just uses the built in player for Piepmatz. Is it possible to start something (i.e. a videostream) and accidentally launch some androshit in the background?

#2

Normally not, unless the mime type you want to open only has an android app associated through the MimeType key. In this case opening a file (or Url) associated with the Mime Type will launch Android Appsupport and once it’s up start the associated app.
As a user you get a popup about this though.

Now, once Android Appsupport is booted, any autostarting services/daemons/apps will boot with it. So in a sense, yes it’s possible to launch some background applications you are not aware of.

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#3

I don’t think so, really. Except of course uninstalling apps will remove background processes and “hijacked” mime type associations (deleting .desktop file will just do the latter).
mimeinfo.cache is rebuild every time you install or uninstall an app (native or android), if there was some MimeType key somewhere causing troubles that may have been cleaned up.

Any of this really shouldn’t affect performance of Piepmatz though.

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