I code for a living - for two decades, now. And UNIX is in my blood.
I have therefore (naturally) installed Termux on my Android phone, and use it to spawn sshd - a very useful process when your ISP connection fails you, since you get to use the phone's internet connection (via ssh -D 1080 ... and configuring Firefox to use localhost:1080 as SOCKS proxy). This does not depend on your contract allowing hotspot-ing or not - it's close to bullet-proof.
Yesterday I ssh-ed in the phone, looking around and checking out the Android environment - and I see Termux's ps aux return among others .... /system/xbin/dropboxd.
What the heck - I never installed Dropbox on my phone!
It does not appear in the list of installed apps, either - and is naturally not removable, since I am not root.
(sigh) Android is great, but there's three things I hate about it:
- every manufacturer installs their own un-installable crap (you can't remove them, since you are not root), which eat up resources and drain the battery, and do God knows what with your data / keystrokes / etc. We live in a post-Snowden era - these things are no longer conspiracy theories.
- the manufacturer has no incentive to pay engineers for creating firmware upgrades. Any Android phone is guaranteed to be left behind, version-wise - unless you use flagships like Nexus.
- to become root and really own my device, I have to trust Chinese hackers-produced malware.
The dropboxd thing was the last straw... I had no prior experience with the process, but succeeded in using ADB and TWRP to unlock my phone's bootloader - and then easily installed CyanogenMod 12.1.
My phone...
- is now at Android 5.1.1. CyanogenMod follows Android, so I am now sure I will have updates - forever.
- the phone's software is open-source - I can (and will) compile it myself. No friggin "mystery" dropboxd process instances
- I have an easy developer option now, to become root whenever I want... And I used my root access to install a debootstrapped Debian in chroot (under
/data/debian)... so now my phone isapt-getenabled - the sky is the limit :-)
Naturally, the first thing I did: apt-get install openssh-server python :-)
Conclusion - the end result is, I dare say, excellent... and I have already begun to see improvements in battery usage (since the manufacturer "stuff" are not running).
Fellow devs - fight your manufacturer, install CM.
I'd be interested to know which specific manufacturer you encountered this on.
Also, two years later... Any new insights?