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I'm on a stable (Installer) build of Cyanogenmod 11 on a Galaxy Nexus, and for a while I've not been able to access 'Settings' at all - tapping on it to try to open it, gives me a "Unfortunately, Settings has stopped." crash.

I'm not a fan of unnecessarily wiping and re-flashing ROMs unless I absolutely have to - and I've got an idea, which is to 'Clear data' for the 'Settings' app (com.android.settings) and maybe that will make the crash go away and me be able to finally access Settings once again.

But what will I lose by doing this?

Will I lose important settings such as my (finely tuned) customised home screen icon layout, or my saved Wifi network passwords? Will it even delete my saved Google account(s) in the OS and possibly cause havoc as a result?

And furthermore, Could backing up the 'Settings' app in Titanium Backup Pro (then restoring), be a solution to fully restore the app's settings if it does?

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    i think you will lose your wifi password, bluetooth name,sound profile, display setting, secuity setting for sure. You wont loose your account settings or home screen customization because there will be data for those particular app and you are not clearing them
    – samnaction
    May 15, 2014 at 14:12
  • @sameer Can you back up your information? To my knowledge, most of the items you've listed are not related to the "data of the settings app". I don't want to try it out myself just to see, either ;)
    – Izzy ♦
    May 15, 2014 at 16:18
  • @Izzy Me either dont wanna try, I remember clearing data in settings and loosing ringtone and display setting in my old phone
    – samnaction
    May 16, 2014 at 5:47
  • @sameer that's the two where I thought you're correct. But e.g. WiFi APNs & passwords are not saved in the apps settings, but directly in the file system (/data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf), I'm pretty sure they are not affected. I rarely use Bluetooth, but AFAIR that's dealt with similarly (/data/misc/bluetooth/*).
    – Izzy ♦
    May 16, 2014 at 6:12
  • Well I bit the bullet and finally hit the 'clear data' button - and as reported above, nothing is lost in the home screen or saved accounts, and nothing else really that I've noticed so far - though it's true I'm not extensively using my phone much at the moment anyway, but, I should also note, clearing it didn't actually reset it back to 0KB, it went from ~16MB to only ~14MB! So maybe some settings were kept and it wouldn't even let me delete all of them...not sure.
    – user31812
    May 22, 2014 at 5:06

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I did it a few days ago for the same problem (CyanogenMod M8 for i9100):

  • I didn't lose anything;
  • It fixes the problem =)
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You won't lose anything unless you clear data of "settings storage" app. It's pretty safe to clear data of settings app.but it'll hide the developer options just like on a new phone.

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As @sameer has mentioned you will lose the wifi password and bluetooth name etc when you do clear data for settings.But using titanium backup pro you can restore them as it is.

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