Archos 43 Startup Wizard 3rd Party Apps Install

I contacted Archos and they said they don't give developer support because they use straight Android, so I am posting this question here. If someone knows of a better place, please let me know.

The company I work for is reselling the Archos 4.3 as a platform for our product. We have several APKs that we are installing in our production facility. I have some questions about different ways to do this. Can someone point me to a forum or maybe here is the place that can answer some specific questions about the Startup Wizard that can install 3rd party apps?

Our process is currently:

1. Connect Archos to PC
2. Touch screen calibration
3. Skip wizard
4. Mount as a drive on PC
5. Copy files to the .system/APK folder
6. Go to settings / recovery and turn on the startup wizard to run again
7. Reboot device
8. touch screen calibration (again)
9. Perform wizard including installing 3rd party apps
10. Now we are ready to ship

The problem is that his process takes a long time. We would like to shorten it. We did originally plan on using ADB to install our applications, but that was very unreliable. Sometimes ADB would get mixed up and we had to reboot the computer. Keep in mind we are making about 100 per day. ADB was really made for developers to debug and test and doesn't seem to be a real hardened production tool.

If we could change our process to be this:

1. Connect Archos to PC
2. Touch screen calibration
3. Complete wizard
4. Mount as drive on PC
5. Copy files to .system/APK

and here is the change if someone can tell me how to do it:

1. Just run the part of the wizard that installs 3rd party apps

Then we would be done. This would save us the reboot开发者_开发技巧 and having to do the touch screen calibration over again.

Does anyone know how to trigger just the process that the startup wizard uses to install 3rd party apps from the .system/apk folder?

I tried writing my own app that installs the APKs, but it makes you go through the UI of approving each app and installing them manually and that takes longer than the startup wizard. The startup wizard is somehow able to install everything in the .system/APK folder without asking the user to go through and approve each one. It assumes that since the user ran the wizard and said yes that they approve. It just shows a toast window that iterates through all of the APKs. There is also a .txt file for each APK that contains the work "shortcut" or "noshortcut" that puts a shortcut or doesn't on the home page.

Thanks....

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What do you mean "part of the wizard that installs apps from the .system/apk folder"? There is no such part of that in the standard setup wizard. The closest thing I can think of is at the end of setup when you have configured your account, the restore of your installed apps from an older device. I'm also not sure what you mean by a ".system/apk" folder. Do you mean /system/app? If so, any .apks in there are automatically scanned and "installed" during the early boot of the device, well before setup wizard.

In general, currently Android is intended to be customized by building system images that are installed on devices. There are no facilities in the standard platform for automatically configuring a device without doing that by flashing an updated system image.

The stuff you are talking about installing from a .system/APK folder doesn't sound like anything that is in the standard platform. The only ways to install apps in the standard platform are through the app installer UI, through the shell with "adb install", and of course if you have the Google apps through the Market app. Manufacturers can certainly add their own customizations for installing apps other ways, though.