Hi all,
we have had multiple issues within Anti-Theft which were mysterious to us:
a) the Anti-Theft UI showing strange texts or
b) strange crashes happen all over Anti-Theft or
c) Anti-Theft crashing immediately when launching the program or
d) Anti-Theft forgetting settings (like avast! Account settings) after updating Anti-Theft to a newer version
Luckily we now had an user who helped us discover a common source to the problem:
THIS ONLY APPLIES TO ROOTED DEVICES!
There is some custom ROMs, that whenever you upgrade the ROM odex (optimize) all the app files in the system folder. This creates so-called ODEX files, which is optimized versions of the APKs. Those ODEX files contain only PROGRAM CODE, not resources. Now, if you upgrade Anti-Theft the resources change, of course. But the old ODEX program code is used to access those resources, resulting in an invalid state.
The solution is to check if you got the following file in your /system/app folder: /system/app/com.avast.android.antitheft.odex
If you find it it is STRONGLY recommended that you
a) uninstall Anti-Theft (e.g. by using Mobile Security Removal Wizard)
b) remove the ODEX file and reboot your phone
c) reinstall avast! Anti-Theft
Then avast! Anti-Theft should work as expected.
We will also include a warning and possibly a fix for this into the program itself as soon as possible.
thanks and best regards
Reinhard
