Random .gs folder appears in Android phone

[amsga]

Hi All,

 

I wanted to check if anyone has ever come across this folder appearing in your android phone?

Internal Storage/Pictures/.gs

The folder itself contains about 100+ other folders and it each one of them appears to be following a mobile app naming convention like:

com.xiaoshijie.sqb
com.hupu.shihuo
tv.icntv.ott
...
com.alibaba.wireless

I am not sure how it got started or what started it.

 

Should I be concerned?

[Alan.Net]

I have the same issue and it is driving me crazy. Have been trying for a month to identify the application(s) that is causing this without any success. It creates 300+ sub directories (in my case) all empty and starts with "com." with sub-directories, all empty in the /Pictures folder. I have tried to scan for any virus but nothing came up.

 

I notice it happens when I reboot my phone but not always the case, sometimes over 24 hours uptime, it will come back.

Have tried to Google for solutions, could not find any.

 

So you (and me) should be concerned about this as it is not normal.

[amsga]

The more I look at it, the more it appears to be Chinese related application names.

But for the life of me, I don't recall downloading or installing Chinese Apps.

 

I see taobao, alipay, huawei.

[Alan.Net]

6 hours ago, amsga said:

The more I look at it, the more it appears to be Chinese related application names.

But for the life of me, I don't recall downloading or installing Chinese Apps.

 

I see taobao, alipay, huawei.

Yes, a lot of Chinese apps and I don't use any of them. My phone is a Galaxy S20FE. My wife have the same phone but she does not have this issue. We have similar apps except that I use Samsung Secure Folder to separate work apps (like whatsapp, Telegram, Chrome). Other than that it's the same.
I just did another test, basically left the phone for 24 hours without rebooting, nothing showed up, but once I rebooted my phone, 334 folders showed up in the Pictures/.gs/... folders.

[amsga]

On 10/28/2022 at 10:55 AM, Alan.Net said:

Yes, a lot of Chinese apps and I don't use any of them. My phone is a Galaxy S20FE. My wife have the same phone but she does not have this issue. We have similar apps except that I use Samsung Secure Folder to separate work apps (like whatsapp, Telegram, Chrome). Other than that it's the same.
I just did another test, basically left the phone for 24 hours without rebooting, nothing showed up, but once I rebooted my phone, 334 folders showed up in the Pictures/.gs/... folders.

Using a Galaxy S10 with Synology Apps and social apps like FB and Insta lite. Use Tele for communications, but other than that, nothing else comes to mind.

[Alan.Net]

On 10/30/2022 at 2:50 PM, amsga said:

Using a Galaxy S10 with Synology Apps and social apps like FB and Insta lite. Use Tele for communications, but other than that, nothing else comes to mind.

Come to think of it, I do have Synology Apps but my wife does not. This could be one possibility. I will try to uninstall them over the weekend to see if the problem goes away.

[Alan.Net]

18 minutes ago, Alan.Net said:

Come to think of it, I do have Synology Apps but my wife does not. This could be one possibility. I will try to uninstall them over the weekend to see if the problem goes away.

Just tried uninstalled all Synology apps, rebooted phone twice, the issue is still there so it's not related to Synology.
I can't uninstall Telegram as I use it for work.

[Alan.Net]

On 11/1/2022 at 4:12 PM, Alan.Net said:

Just tried uninstalled all Synology apps, rebooted phone twice, the issue is still there so it's not related to Synology.
I can't uninstall Telegram as I use it for work.

I just tried to enable Developer Mode and checked the running processes, there does not seem to be anything unusual so I a still at a loss.

Appreciate if anyone in this forum can advice.

[amsga]

On 11/3/2022 at 10:18 AM, Alan.Net said:

I just tried to enable Developer Mode and checked the running processes, there does not seem to be anything unusual so I a still at a loss.

Appreciate if anyone in this forum can advice.

I suspect it could be a background service that pops up from time to time.

I don't need to reboot my phone but I know within the next 24 hours, it will recreate the folders if I were to delete it.

[Alan.Net]

On 11/4/2022 at 7:45 PM, amsga said:

I suspect it could be a background service that pops up from time to time.

I don't need to reboot my phone but I know within the next 24 hours, it will recreate the folders if I were to delete it.

An update on this. After the latest security update (Oct 2022) by Samsung and I also uninstalled a shopping app call Lazada, the problem seems to go away. I've tried a few reboot cycles and the issue of the 300+ directories under /picture/.gs is gone.

I will monitor for a week and report back.

[Alan.Net]

On 11/10/2022 at 8:22 AM, Alan.Net said:

An update on this. After the latest security update (Oct 2022) by Samsung and I also uninstalled a shopping app call Lazada, the problem seems to go away. I've tried a few reboot cycles and the issue of the 300+ directories under /picture/.gs is gone.

I will monitor for a week and report back.

Hi, I'm happy to report the issue seems to be resolved although the root cause is still not clear.
It's either the Oct 2022 update or the Lazada shopping app that caused it, for my case.

[amsga]

11 hours ago, Alan.Net said:

Hi, I'm happy to report the issue seems to be resolved although the root cause is still not clear.
It's either the Oct 2022 update or the Lazada shopping app that caused it, for my case.

I also have Lazada running on my phone.

Let me try uninstalling it and see what happens.

[Alan.Net]

10 hours ago, amsga said:

I also have Lazada running on my phone.

Let me try uninstalling it and see what happens.

Hi,  After you uninstall Lazada, you need to reboot once, delete the .gs folder, then reboot again.
Let me know how it goes.

[amsga]

On 11/15/2022 at 5:52 AM, Alan.Net said:

Hi,  After you uninstall Lazada, you need to reboot once, delete the .gs folder, then reboot again.
Let me know how it goes.

Seems like it is Lazada.

Once I uninstall it and delete the .gs folder, it does not appear.

Will continue to monitor over the week.

[Alan.Net]

13 hours ago, amsga said:

Seems like it is Lazada.

Once I uninstall it and delete the .gs folder, it does not appear.

Will continue to monitor over the week.

Thats good news. Looks like we should file a complain to Google and Lazada.

[Alan.Net]

On 11/17/2022 at 9:32 AM, Alan.Net said:

Thats good news. Looks like we should file a complain to Google and Lazada.

I've filed it as a bug report to Google and to Lazada.

[Grf11]

Hi, jfi ... found a quick solution ... not sure if it will have any side effects!

 

Delete the .gs folder in Pictures ... and simply create a dummy .gs text file !

it wont let me create a folder with the same name as a file

Unless the app deletes it first

[BadSBeach]

It may be coming from various source apps because I just found not one but three .gs folders in my internal storage (Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 512gb).

 

Two .gs folders (.gs_fs0 & .gs_fs6)

with all .jpg files that, when selected, open to a stock photo icon with an exclamation point in the lower right quadrant. All of the .jpg do this.

 

The third .gs folder has all weird folders labels, most of which make no sense to but as someone else already mentioned, it seems Chinese in nature. 

 

...not sure how Chinese Alibaba is, though, because that's the ONE folder/ file label that I recognize. I recently downloaded Alibaba, not Lazada but maybe the same developer, idk.

 

What I do know, though, is Alibaba is going byebye from my phone right now. Not worth the risk and bloatware 

 

In a possibly unrelated side note, I also found a weird folder titled "pudding" (all lowercas) that contains 6 or 7 .try files that, when opened, appear to be encrypted. More of the same from the Alibaba app or do I have bigger problems than Alibaba with that pudding app?

[itsfreerealestate]

I also have this occurring on a Samsung Note 10+ and have never seen it before. I have a .gs_fs6 and a 0 folder under images in google files; as a guess, fs seems to suggest something to do with file or folder structure etc. They contain tens of files that are single bytes in size, have no preview, can't be opened, are jpgs and have dates from months ago; they could be thumbnails or temporary files? I've deleted the files and folder multiple times, then they reappear about 24h or more later. I've never had lazada installed. I do have aliexpress but have never had a problem with it. It seems like it could be triggered by me sending files to the recycle bin, because I sift the image folder fairly often. It also seems to have appeared right around me removing the sd card from the phone, suggesting it could have something to do with some default directory settling; like an app using a hidden folder on the sd card to store thumbnails previously, and perhaps now it's creating the same directory on the internal storage, but visibly.

[itsfreerealestate]

Beginning to suspect this is also caused by alibaba / aliexpress. Looking through the folders I found another two titled .gs and _.gs which contain a subfolder titled com.alibaba.aliexpresshd, which contains another titled .gs_fs6 (or _.gs_fs6 for the latter), which also contains another titled 0, which is empty. I have alibaba and aliexpress installed but don't use alibaba so will uninstall it and try deleting the folders, agen. I've had these installed for years and not seen this before. And it seems to have appeared with other ecommerce apps (which all tend to use the same platform) a reasonable time ago, so I'm guessing it's a random glitch rather than a general platform update.

[itsfreerealestate]

Can confirm it seems aliexpress does this as well. After deleting alibaba and the folders, I tried opening aliexpress (having not opened it today) and the folders immediately reappeared. Interestingly, they don't immediately reappear if I delete them and immediately reopen the app again. They could possibly be related to the "what's new" or game splash screen on the app and being altered on a 24h basis, hence the pseudo-rhythmic pattern the folders reappear on. I've now deleted aliexpress as well, but will reinstall it and see if they reappear. Lots of these apps seem to be built on the same platform so it may explain why it's appearing with different ecommerce apps.

[itsfreerealestate]

Reinstalled aliexpress, folders reappeared in the file explorer. The names, creation date and time of the folder confirms its aliexpres doing it. I expect these are template images the app is caching on the phone that are supposed to be hidden but are showing up in the regular file browser for some reason. And that they could appear with numerous other similar ecommerce apps; e.g. temu, wish, dhgate etc. I'll report it as an error.