How do I (forcibly) remove the stock android Phone application from the emulator instance?
I would especially like answers from people who have actually successfully removed the Phone application.
Removing the Phone application probably also necessitates removing the Contacts application, as they are tightly integrated, that is fine.
Solution
After much research it seems the only solution is to rebuild the Android SDK from source, as Maciej Pigulski answered.
After fetching the android source, remove Phone and Contacts from the Android makefile build/target/product/core.mk. And build the SDK as usual, i.e.:
. build/envsetup.sh
lunch generic-eng
make sdk
And in out/host/linux-x86/sdk you will have a zip file containg a fresh new sdk ready for use in e.g. Eclipse.
I have an idea how this could be done but this is not an easy way.
It requires source code of the Android OS you need an emulator for. Then in the make files you can disable including of the Phone application to the output image and build the OS with ‘make sdk’ task. This will produce an SDK (like ones available from the Google site) with the binaries that has Phone application excluded. Then when you will create an emulator with this SDK it wont have the Phone.apk.
Painful but if you really need it, give it a try.