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Comment by vbernat | Hacker News Reader

On Android, system apps cannot be uninstalled but can usually be disabled. In "Settings", "Apps", select the app and choose "Disable".

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Correct. My (mostly rhetorical) question is why is Facebook installed in this way? It certainly doesn't need to be. It runs just fine on phone/roms that don't preload it, installed as a user app.

My phone is rooted, and I've uninstalled it properly using Titanium Backup. There were also hidden Facebook "app installer" and "app manager" apps, which I removed.

doesn't the "chat bubbles" feature require being installed as a system app?

There's a permission for drawing over other apps.

You're thinking of Facebook Messenger, and no, it doesn't.

My understanding is that "system app" just means it's baked into the ROM. So it's not actually possible to uninstall it without flashing. Disabling removes it from all the application lists except the one in settings where you can re-enable it. [0] My guess is that the rooted uninstall is removing it from all system lists. But the binary is still there in your ROM, unless you've flashed a new ROM that removes it.

[0] This is also why the disable button dialog discusses uninstalling the updates to an application. Because updates are obviously not written into the ROM; they're in normal application storage.

ROM might imply that it's a different hardware storage device or some such. That's not normally the case; it's just a different partition mounted at /system. User apps are in /data/app while system apps are in /system/app.

/system shouldn't normally be writable at runtime on non-rooted devices, so updates get installed to /data/app like user apps. A proper uninstall with root, e.g. using Titanium Backup does remove the app from /system/app.

Um, so why should Facebook be baked into the ROM?

"Disabled"

https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

This was annoying to me when I had an older phone with less available memory. Many of the system apps were useless to me and just served to take up space. The system partition had to take up enough space to accommodate these apps whether I used them or not which resulted in less available space for what I did use. Pretty annoying.

Fun fact: On Nexus devices, the Google app can not ever be disabled, nor can Google Now Launcher – not even if you don’t use them for anything, and have alternatives set as default for everything.

Here’s a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/QbJF1AG.png

Fun fact: disabling Chrome on my phone (flagship Google) causes every single app to crash on every interaction, including third-party apps like Signal.

Try installing another browser and the AOSP webview and set it to default

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