All of a sudden, Amazon search has popped up on the right click contextual menu for me. Haven’t seen it before today. I can’t find a way to remove it either; I’d prefer not to be reminded every time I try to copy something that I can buy Travis County district court on Amazon. I use the app a lot because of Amazon lockers as well as shopping at an Amazon fresh store. So deleting it (which would presumably remove it) really isn’t a great choice for me.

Anyone else encountering this? Any solutions? Thanks for any help.

EDIT: After some great comments, I decided to reininstall/reboot and that seemed to have gotten rid of it. TBD if it comes back though. Would still like to know if it’s possible to adjust that menu. Some apps I use are hidden behind the overflow menu, which would be cool if I could reorganize. Thanks!

SUPA EDIT: Did some more sleuthing and may have found an answer. As I commented here, try putting your app in deep sleep. While it kills all background activity, I think it also stops apps from displaying the problem app’s menu button.

  • ddonuts4English
    18•1 year ago

    Since nobody in the comments is being helpful I figured I’d do a little research for you. The TL;DR is apps can just put ads on your text selection any time they want + there’s nothing you can do about it. At least on my phone, the ads are hidden in the overflow menu so I hadn’t noticed them until I saw your post + checked in there. Perhaps on your device they show up because you have a wider screen?

    Here’s another person with a similar complaint: https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/228224/how-to-edit-the-android-context-menu

    • ddonuts4English
      5•1 year ago

      Since this is built into the OS, your only options are modifying the app or modding the OS, neither of which are things I’m well versed in but here’s some stuff that can get you started if you’re feeling adventurous:

      Modding the app: The way these actions work is android apps add a line in their manifest that registers them as handlers for “ACTION_PROCESS_TEXT”. Article on this.

      I’d imagine you’d want to try and find a way to remove that registration from the app’s manifest. Couldn’t tell you exactly how but I know ReVanced lets you mod apps other than YouTube, so it could help with that?

      Modding the OS: Since it’s built into the OS. If you can find the code that handles text selection actions, you could start with a custom ROM and add your own code that disables that action. Maybe even build a UI around it to help others with a similar complaint?!

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        Thanks for the serious reply, I appreciate it! Now that you mention it, me having a fold must definitely be it. For some apps when I highlight text, the menu sometimes spans almost the whole screen. And again, thank you for the tips you provided for the software side. Unfortunately, I’m a hardware guy so diving into any of that seems impossible to me haha.

        What I did find however, is a possible solution though. To originally remove the Amazon search button, I had to reinstall the app. This worked for a few hours, but at some point it came back on its own. Doing some more sleuthing, I realized that Samsung (maybe it’s an android thing too though?) has a deep sleep function. Basically, you can deep sleep an app so it’s essentially disabled until you open the app again. So even going into the system’s app list in settings, it now lists Amazon as “disabled.” So no running in the background and I suppose telling other apps it’s installed so they can display that search button. I only just discovered this while posting, so while the button is removed now, it remains to be seen if it’ll stay working.

        This set up works for me since the app stays easily accessible in my app drawer, and as far as I can tell, still works perfectly fine upon launching. So I can still use it for my required use cases. Now if you need your apps to function in the background this may not be a solution. I wish there was just a simple setting is settings somewhere that addressed what and in what order appears in this menu. That would simplify a lot of things. Just another reminder of how we own nothing anymore… In any case, thanks for the response. Hope this can help you too.