chrome uninstall left behind com.android.chrome[noinfo] apk with active connections

Question

I have an unrooted Samsung Note phone (active service with AT&T). It is almost two years old and became slower and slower. I do not have any unnecessary apps and I mostly use my phone for email and simple browsing. To understand the slowness, I downloaded "Network Connection" (Ref https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.antispycell.connmonitor) app and found that the chrome app had 21 active connections maintained all the time (even after reboot). Some of these connections are to

*.1e100.net (6 connections) (see screen shot) edge-star-shv-03-sea1.facebook.com la.linkedin.com or 1a.linkedin.com *.amazonaws.com *.akamaitechnology.com *.stumbleupon.net *.softlayer.com *.twttr.com *.cachefly.net

I got furious over this weird behavior of chrome and uninstalled chrome. After removal, I rebooted my phone, but there is still a leftover active app now identified as

com.android.chrome[noinfo]

which continue to maintain the above connections. I am still clueless on what's going on and what type of information is being collected from my phone by these open connections --who is watching and why? Any idea on how to remove the seemingly viral apk com.android.chrome[noinfo] without rooting the device. Please note that this app is not listed by application manager.

Answer 1

The behaviour of the browser is perfectly normal. Because opening a new internet connection takes a lot of power, after an app is finished with an HTTP connection to a given server, Android keeps the connection open a little while longer in case the app wants to download more from the same server. Keeping the connection open while idle doesn't take any extra power. This fits well with the usual behaviour of web browsers: typically you download a web page, then all the images &c. for that page, an AJAX request to the same site, and then a few minutes later maybe a new page from the same site.

The servers you mention are very typical. Amazon AWS and Akamai are content distribution networks. They're used to host many websites. People who run websites pay these companies to host static content and serve it to end users, which is good for you because it keeps internet latency down. When you visit (say) android.stackexchange.com, only the dynamic content comes from Stack Exchange's servers, and the static content - images, fonts, etc. - might come from a server much closer to you, run by Akamai or another CDN.

Other sites on your list are sources of "share" and "like" buttons, such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn. Every time you visit a page with the official Facebook "Like" button, the browser has to go to Facebook's server to download it. That's how Facebook tracks you across different sites, but it's not the browser tracking you: it's the websites you visit. Uninstalling your browser and switching to a different one won't make any difference.

There's one last thing that seems to have added to your confusion: the "Application details" screen in that app shows a log of which sites the app has connected to, not the sites that have open connections right now. That's why old connections are still shown in the list after you restart the device, and after uninstalling the app.