I’m on a FP3 with e/OS 1.2 and a SIM from Vodafone in Germany.
In my office, the cell signal is really bad, which doesn’t matter as I don’t want to get disturbed with phonecalls while working.
But the problem is that the SIM toolkit establishes a connection pretty often and then loosing it again soon after. The connection creates a push notification with a double beep. And other than regular notifications, those from the SIM-toolkit can not be disabled.
This is so annoying, why can they not be muted or even disabled?
this application is simply from your SIM card. Indeed you can’t delete it, and I don’t think it’s possible to hide it either (at least not on Bliss Launcher). If you remove your SIM card, this application will disappear from the home screen.
On FP you can remove the sim card, do a reboot of the phone and put the sim card back. Normally the SIM Toolkit icon should be gone.
Well, the problem is not the app icon. The problem is that this SIM-Toolkit has to work in the background and whenever the phone establishes a connection with the cell network, it creates a push notification. And only that notification is disturbing, not the app icon on the home screen.
No worries. Muting the notification is what I would like to do, but that app doesn’t allow muting. It says, that it is not allowed for just that one app.
As a cross reference I can confirm that Notifications are greyed out for this app.
As a pure guess I can imagine some situation where Advanced Privacy might have interfered with the SIM Tool Kit’s work and left “unfinished business” in the app.
In this case and if the SIM is working correctly I would got to
Settings > Apps and notifications > Show all … apps > top right 3 dot menu > Show system > Advanced Privacy > Storage & cache > Clear storage.
I did this 2 hours ago on my phone with no adverse effect.
None of that helps. From the message in the notification I’m sure it is deliberate that the notifications can not be turned off. Here is how the notification looks like when I long press on it:
Yes, I’ve done all that. I’m still sure this is a deliberate decision by e/OS, just don’t know why. Not sure why this should have to do with the carrier, I don’t think I have any software from my carrier on my phone, it’s “just” e/OS, isn’t it?
I’m not talking about fault, but I don’t seem to have any stock Android on my phone. Instead, I have e/OS and that removes stuff from stock Android and other stuff gets modified. The SIM-Toolkit might be inherited from stock Android, but a modification would be possible, it’s open source software. So, someone has decided to either build that “feature” in or not to remove it if it really comes from upstream. However, I’ve never seen such behaviour with any my other Android phones ever.
Android phones come with a bunch of pre-installed apps
Yes, pre-installed by e/OS. Neither my phone nor any of the software on it has ever been in the hands of my carrier.
I can understand the fact that /e/ could make this application not appear. But unfortunately, this is not necessarily a good solution as long as other users want to use this application.
Once again it is not from the ROM but from the SIM card.
On a friend’s Fairphone 3 I managed to remove it by removing the SIM card and rebooting. And even before that it did not give any notification. I don’t know why this is the case for you.
On my S9 this application never even appeared. It seems indeed that its operation is erratic. Which is a problem.
Maybe an application like SuperFreezz could help you… Maybe.
I do not want to add to your frustration about this, my first suggestiion was really just about clearing the data there in case it is something in “history” which is hitting a notification, to eliminate that.
I do not know if this is applicable to you, but my point is somewhat backed up by this article where we see that the carrier does use this to do necessary jobs . As they can update your SIM card remotely, then there is the opportunity for SIM Tool Kit to try to update your device. This is without considering if the carrier might try to exploit the device for “value-added services”.
I was going to offer Nerds Chalk but @Nicolas_Sas already did, so I will just quote from it.
As smartphones became more and more feature-rich, the process of setting up SIM cards (called provisioning in technical terms) became harder by the day. That’s because provisioning a SIM on a phone needed details like SMS center number, MMS server name, mailbox number, and other data. This data differed from one operator to the other and that’s where SIM Application Toolkit came into being.
SIM Toolkit or SIM Application Toolkit (STK) is a set of commands available on your SIM card that are defined by 3GPP and ETSI specifications and can either be activated by the user or due to a networking event. Essentially, they’re small applications that come preinstalled on your SIM which itself can be considered a mini-computer where programming is possible.
STK was developed as a means to run applications directly on a SIM card that’s based on a GSM network. The standard is used by mobile network operators and service providers to execute actions that trigger various value-added services. These value-added services can then be implemented on your SIM card to bring a carrier’s custom UI and menus onto different handsets.
The Toolkit app that’s available on your phone is programmed into the SIM card by your cellular service provider. This app enables means of interaction between the network and user, reveals the mobile equipment interface, and provides users access to network control.
Speculation. It is quite possible that /e/ does interfere with this general workflow, as many other /e/ users have the (oposite?) experience of APN not being updated nicely on /e/OS.
Thanks a lot, I understand much better now. Looks like I have to live with that as it’s very unlikely to find somebody at the carrier who knows what I’m talking about or who does but doesn’t want to admit.
Just wanted to list, why this is still kind of confusing:
as I just wiped my phone a few weeks ago to install /e/ version 1.2 from scratch (I was still on Android 9 before), I had my doubts that any left over data would do the harm. However, I still clean cache and user data, but without any improvement.
the same behaviour was already there on the old version of /e/
using that SIM on a stock Android does NOT behave like that
In summary, that made me think that this must be /e/ related somehow. At least, the underlying OS should be able to control how notifications are performed, if it can’t prevent them in the first place - which I still struggle to believe. Yes, STK is from the carrier, but it must use some API from the OS to create a notification.
The STK notifications are a double sound combined with phone vibration - and I see them 10-15 times a day.
I know how annoying it is to have runaway notifications [1].
So on one hand you have SIM Tool Kit and its issues or perhaps the notifications are inappropriate and come from a malfunction; it is difficult to be sure perhaps.
I think it is worth recording as an issue; Report an issue after checking if it has been reported already.
@Nicolas_Sas tried SuperFreezz with no luck, the SIM Toolkit doesn’t even appear in the list of background apps there. I waited for a couple of days, but still, it’s not there. So I removed that again.
@AnotherElk Popups or Flash Messages described in that article if more like spam messages sent by the carrier. The notifications I’m seeing is just a local status message which appears when the phone connected to a tower. The described methods in the link don’t apply here. But thanks for the link.
@aibd Yes, I’ll report an issue and see if it gets any attention.
Thanks everybody for your constant help, this is very impressive!
