Month: October 2022

Can’t uninstall an app – app is device administrator & must be deactivated

admin

So I installed an Camera blocking app on Android and after a while I tried to uninstall it. It kept coming back! I tried force stopping it, using few different ways to uninstall it – it kept coming back.

Turns out the reason is this app became a device administrator (to be fair, I got this warning when installing from play store) and I guess it refused to uninstall itself. I even went to Playstore to uninstall it from there but instad of Uninstall option there was a Deactivate button!

pressing Deactivate didnt do anything except show me a message : This app is a device administrator and must be deactivated before uninstalling. Thanks for nothing, google!

Sneaky app!

How do I enable or disable a device administrator app?

The solution on Android 10+ was to find it in Device Administrator settings and turn it off.

It really varies where this setting is on different phones. I could not find it myself on my phone so I just opened Settings and searched for “admin” then clicked on “Device admin apps” and sure enough, the app was there!

So I clicked on app name and then “Deactivate this device admin app” and then uninstaleld the app and it didn’t come back.

Note: Device administrator app setting can be found in various places in Settings. If you cant find it by search, open Settings then try one of these places:

  • Security & location > Advanced > Device admin apps.
  • Security > Advanced > Device admin apps.
  • Location and Security > Device Administrator
  • Security > Device administrators

Disable This app is preventing shutdown message in Windows 11/10

admin

This is one of the more annoying features of Windows since forever. You restart or shutdown PC, only to be greeted with this kind of message:

Even worse, Windows is saying it is closing apps but many times it never closes them. Countless times I did a shutdown, went away (or even left it overnight) much later and this wwindow was still on!

I get it, this is suppose to prevent us losing some important work but I cant remember when I needed this. Even if you click Cancel it will shutdown sometimes.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t provide an easy solution/checkbox in settings. Here is how to fix it. You will need to edit registry but it is not hard.

Important: Please only do this if you know what you are doing. Call someone who knows if you don’t. You can mess up Windows if you do something wrong in Registry. I cant be responsible if something goes wrong. Thank you for understanding 🙂

1. Open registry editor.

Click on Start Menu or Search icon and just type “registry” then click on registry editor app. If Windows asks you for permissions just click YES.

2. Navigate to (open):

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

3. In the right panel, right click the empty space and choose New > String. and name it AutoEndTasks. That is important, it has to be named exactly like this.

4. Double click newly created AutoEndTasks (REG_SZ) and set its Value data to 1.

Click OK, close Registry editor, restart Windows.

Note: When you restart Windows after what you just did, you might still get this annoying notice “This app is preventing shutdown message” because Windows has not yet reloaded Registry. Next time you restart or shutdown Windows you should not see this message.

If this doesn’t work, try creating DWORD Value in step 3. For me, DWORD Value didn’t work. Only after I created String value it worked.