How To Stop IM’s From Auto-Updating & How To Downgrade To The Latest Supported Version

IM’s (Facebook messenger, LINE, WhatsAPP, Viber, etc,) by their nature are one of the top things on a phone that people want to be able to spy on, and FlexiSPY is proud to be the spy application that monitors over 13 IM clients, the most in the business.

But there is an inherit problem with all IM applications, and that is that IM’s often auto-update themselves, sometimes up to 2-4 times a week. These frequent updates by the IM’s don’t usually bring some great new feature that tech publications will write up about, the updates are actually the kind that dont bode so well for spy software, encryption updates. These updates render parts of spy software unusable, and it takes time for us to update our software to be compatible with the updated IM again.

The workaround

By doing what we describe below, you will be inline with full support for FlexiSPY.

#1 ) Turn Off Automatic Updates

Here’s how to turn off automatic updates so that the target device is never notified and never downloads an available update.

1. Open up google play store on the device (this is the native app for downloading applications to the phone.)
2. On the Play store, swipe to the right side or tap the toggle button so that you end up in the settings menu.
3. In the settings section remove the checkmark from “App updates available”
4. Finally, Tap on “Auto-update apps” and choose “Do not auto-update apps”

Once done, the target phone will no longer receive notifications of available updates, and it will also no longer auto update.

Functional Limitation

Some apps may cease to function properly if their version is too old. Don’t worry – except for WhatsApp, If this happens nothing breaks. The user would open up their app and an in-app message will tell them that they need to update the app. The message will direct them to the Play store where the user will then tap on the “Update” button.

Downgrading IM’s

But what if one of the phones IM applications has already been updated to a version that FlexiSPY doesn’t yet support?

The answer in this case is to downgrade the IM app to the version that currently has full support by FlexiSPY.

Here’s how to downgrade the IM app of your choice to one fully supported by FlexiSPY. Note that to check which version you should download of the IM app, checkout our compatibility page, here.

Step 1 – Uninstall the current the version of the app you will want to downgrade.

– You can do this by doing the following (Go to the settings on your target device -> Find and open application manager -> Open the app you want to uninstall and click “Uninstall”)

Step 2 – Find the earlier version of your app.

Android drawer is a good place to get old versions of your app if you’d like to find the APK’s for yourself. Head there, type in your IM app name and then scroll down to find the version that corresponds with FlexiSPY’s version. (Or directly download the correct APK files from the chart we’ve made below:)

After downloading the appropriate APKs for your incompatible IM app, turning off the app update notification settings, and turning off auto update, all as described in this article, you should no longer have any issue with FlexiSPY not capturing all of the IM data.

We hope this has been informative, but if you have any questions about the content in this post please comment below and we’ll be happy to respond! Also, for more posts like this, please signup to our mailing list here which will then notify you of future posts on how to use certain FlexiSPY features!