Why blocking some trackers lead to crashes and how to fix them?

[MuntashirAkon]

In many cases, certain functions of the tracker are initialised when the application is being launched. Many tracker libraries offer one or more content providers, some of which need to be initialised this way. So, if these providers are blocked or disabled, and the library or the application wasn’t made to handle errors due to this, the application may crash.

If the cause of the crashes are indeed the content providers, they might be fixed by one of the following ways:

1. Block the providers using Intent Firewall (IFW) only.
2. Unblock the providers one by one to find the real culprit and then block the rests again keeping the culprit unlocked.
3. A more advanced approach is to edit the APK to delete such initialisations by looking at the backtrace in the crash log.

If procedure 1 and 2 do not work, the cause of the crashes may not be the providers. In such cases, you should unblock all components for the application, perform investigation by checking all the blocked components one by one, or find an alternative application. Of late, many quality open source software have been developed for Android which could be used as replacements for many proprietary applications.