Concerns about security and privacy as well the widespread reporting of data breaches have led more people to become aware of their own device security and take steps to make it better. So when you’ve gone through a device, you may notice LIA Informant, but what is it?
LIA Informant is a piece of software that comes with LG smartphones that helps with features of the phone including reminders and events. It comes pre-installed and can’t be easily removed without using additional developer tools.
Let’s look at what LIA Informant is, what it does, what aspects of the phone it has access to and whether there is anything you can do with it to stop it from operating on your device, and how to fix it if it stops.
What Is a LIA Informant?
LIA Informant is developed by LG to help their smartphones perform diagnostic functions.
What it does is helps display all the information related in the Smart Notice Widget that keeps track of the various LG Services and reports on information and notifications from processes that are operating on the device.
You may notice this as a running service with the name com.lge.ia.task.informant, but it’s nothing to be worried about and comes preinstalled with LG phones to help them as a diagnostic tool.
LIA Informant monitors several aspects such as network connections on the device as that is the main information it will relay back to LIA Informant.
The app will gain access to other features and functions like weather alerts, callback reminders, event notifications like birthdays and meetings, a battery warning alert, adding frequently called people to a list, and traffic notifications.
LG Health is another app that takes information from LIA Informant, as it is an app that helps you track activity levels and fitness per day by monitoring running, walking, cycling, hiking and other physical activities.
Many users report that this is a bloatware app, in other words, it doesn’t perform many useful functions and only seems to slow down the device and take up system storage. Bloatware is often unnecessary and will instead hold back the full potential of the device.
Android phones tend to come with several of these types of bloatware apps depending on the manufacturer, and they’re often difficult to remove but they don’t always need to be removed if they can be disabled.
Is LIA Informant a Spy App?
LIA Informant is not a spy app, malware, spyware or any other such intrusive software. It is developed by smartphone manufacturer LG as proprietary software and meets all the usual security software standards.
LIA Informant may have access to other areas of your phone by default or may prompt you to access these later. You shouldn’t notice any increased security breaches or vulnerabilities by allowing LIA Informant access to these areas.
This includes permissions to apps such as your calendar, events, calls and others including your contacts. LIA Informant has been shown to read call logs including incoming and outgoing, as well as syncing this up with who you have called.
The SD card can also be read and LIA Informant ostensibly needs this access in order to optimize storage space, storage organization, temporary file cleanups as well as keep tabs on what data is being kept. LIA Informant may suggest removing unused files.
It seems to be that many users are concerned about this app, but much of the confusion likely stems from the name containing the word ‘Informant’, however it seems to be the case that this is just a bad translation as the app was originally Korean given that LG is Korean.
How to Disable LIA Informant App?
Removing LIA Informant will take a few extra steps as it is not like the traditional app that you can remove via the Play Store. You’ll also need a powershell app or some other method to root your smartphone to be able to access the option to disable it.
Apps and services that have been added by the manufacturer or similar developer are notoriously difficult to remove and require you to root your device.
Rooting a phone is a way to gain administrator level access to a device, similar to jailbreaking although technically jailbreaking is for iPhones only.
You can try going into Settings and then Apps and find LIA Informant and see if you can Force Stop or Disable it.
First, open Settings and go to Developer options and then enable USB Debugging in the Developer options. You’ll need to get a compatible debug system like Android Debug Bridge that you can find in the Android SDK Platform-Tools package.
You can then open a Powershell window on your Windows computer and then connect your phone as well in order to disable the service.
First, extract the contents of the ADB file into a separate folder on your computer and then press and hold the shift button and right-click in a blank area to open the Powershell window.
After that, then use the command \adb shell pm uninstall –user 0 com.lge.ia.task.informant after connecting to it properly via the adb devices command in Powershell.
How Do You Fix the LIA Informant App?
If you get an error message that com.lge.ia.task.process.shared has stopped or has an issue, you can restart the service to try and get it working again.
Go to Settings and then tap on Apps, then tap on the three vertical dots on the top right to open up another menu.
Tap on Show SystemApps and then tap on com.lge.ia.task.informant and then open the Storage Option and finally Clear Cache and Data.
While you’re here, you can hit Force Stop which will then automatically restart the service and hopefully clear up any issues with it.
If the above steps don’t work, you can try just doing a soft reboot of the device by holding the power button down.
