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Comment by Farbklex | Hacker News Reader

I own a Google Pixel 3a.

Google Play Music is the default, preinstalled music app. It's discontinued and can't even play my local MP3s anymore. YouTube Music is unfortunately worse. Play Music can't be uninstalled.

Google Photos is the default, preinstalled Photo Gallery app. Part of its service is discontinued. It can't be uninstalled.

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I bought a Samsung phone a few months ago. It too has a bunch of apps you can't remove. It's still not clear to me why some apps can be disabled and uninstalled but others can just be disabled. But oh yeah, with ADB it seems you can remove some/all of them.

Except with Samsung you don't really know what you're uninstalling because a bunch of apps are weirdly named and not documented at all which leads one down the rabbit hole of inventorying each app and the permissions it has.

Android is a mess.

You can remove them, but it's a pain and you need to either be a developer or have technical knowledge

Don't forget that one time when one of the apps became an addware which showed adds on the lock screen.

https://fossbytes.com/peel-remote-use-remove-smart-remote/

// just a nitpick: advertisement is just one 'd' so, as far as I know it should be ads

My Galaxy S4 on 4.4.x had this app pre-installed. I must have either rooted prior to any parasitic behaviour or attribute it to Xprivacy, as I did not encounter any ads. Regardless, not endorsing this app, just an alternative view, as it not only acted as a stopgap for a flailing universal remote, but also had a decent TV guide from what I can remember.

That one hurt when it deteriorated into adware. At its prime, it was a great app, and being able to control my TV using the IR Blaster in my HTC One M7 really felt like The Future™ for a brief couple years.

Now the app is gone and phones have removed the IR Blaster.

That app was super useful for me when I had a Note 3 with IR blaster, I had so many devices which I could control (and oddly enough, my laptop had an IR sensor). Shame to see what it turned into.

After unboxing a new device, i usually take a look at what is installed (using pm) and poke around (by reading the app manifest and sending intents to the app).

> Android is a mess

Compare apples to apples - Samsung and their Android version are a mess. Most vendors do the same because they can and to differentiate themselves and earn extra money ( like having Facebook crap preinstalled). Android would have never worked if it weren't so open in the first place, and at least the workarounds are well documented and you can usually flash with LineageOS or something; it doesn't help your average Joe, but each manufacturer having their own custom OS with the same crap wouldn't have helped him either.

People keep making this argument, but if you go out and try and get an Android phone, it’s more likely to be Samsung or one of the Chinese brands. Even with enthusiasts Android is a commodity phone. You min-max price and features more often than not because there’s no lock in to an ecosystem.

Why buy a Samsung when Oneplus is just as cheap, and not complete junk?

Design...

Not just design. I was so excited to get a 5g oneplus 8,I'd heard great things about the 7 and 7t.

Well I went through three of them with T-mobile and all 3 had serious issues which varied, but all 3 had a very serious battery issue.

All 3 phones were new out of box, and all 3 needed to be charged multiple times per day, probably about 4 with light use. All 3 got hot, and I believe the culprit on all 3 was the front screen fingerprint reader. Upon checking advanced battery usage tab, screen took up 98% of the battery, something I've never even heard of.

Constant random reboots, loss of signal and having to reboot to re-obtain, so hot it was uncomfortable to hold or have in pocket.

I thought about getting a 7t McLaren or whatever, but decided against it due to lack if 5g at the time.

I really hope they ironed out the issues because I'm definitely over Samsung and can't wait to get rid of my current S20+. And the 8 was really a joy to use, wasn't even the pro version and seemed far faster than my s20. Shoot, it took me three failures to finally be forced to try another phone.

Edit: fix words.

I have a OnePlus 8t since last october and have not found any issue on the battery side. On the contrary I'm quite pleased with battery management since i can charge it in 30 minutes from 0 to almost 100%, so usually i just charge it for 5-10 minutes and I can use it all day easily.

With full charge on average I get around a day or two without recharging with mostly firefox, youtube, messaging apps open and some light gaming.

Battery saving mode gets me almost 1 hour more of usage when I'm at 15%

Haven't really had any signal problems and 5g isn't that much of an improvement around where I live so it's not really a concern for me but ymmv

Well, for one they just had to jump aboard the bandwagon and drop the headphone jack. Samsung did that too on some models, but at least they still have the option.

I mean, I'm not everyone but I can and do both buy and recommend phones with close to stock android, even if they are more expensive.

Like Sony and Motorola used to be pretty good about that.

Problem is, it's hard to search those phone finder sites for "Android purity" so I have to dig deep to find out how bad it will even be. The more fancy features listed on the manufacturers marketing page the more confident I can be that the features are all preinstalled spyware that might offer a cute gimmick as a bribe, at best.

FWIW the only two apps that my S20 came with that I wish were uninstallable are the Tips app and the Samsung calendar app, and there is a good reason for the latter (if a user managed to delete all calendar apps on Android the OS does not like that at all). They're pretty trivial to hide.

But some people might have to accept the presence of a Facebook shim for installation is such an incredibly mainstream proposition that they are in a vanishingly small minority wanting rid of it.

The comment that kicked off this whole thread is about the Pixel 3a being a mess, so while I'll agree that Samsung and their Android version are a mess, Google isn't exactly helping here either

> Android is a mess.

TBH, so is iOS if you start actually worrying about services running on the device that may not be necessary or helpful, but iOS just doesn't tell a regular user they exist.

You can uninstall any app by using adb shell:

    1. sudo apt-get-install android-tools-adb
    2. Connect phone using usb, choose file transfer
    3. In terminal type: adb shell
    4. On phone allow dialog that appeared
    5. In terminal in adb shell type: pm list package
    6. Find which app is it and uninstall it: pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.facebook.services

A friend of mine used to say "Is your grandma so senile that she can't type `configure; make; make install`?"

The problem GP is pointing at is that uninstalling an unwanted app shouldn't be hard like that.

It's kind of unfortunate how the "easy" works.

For a programmer sitting in front of a desktop that already has Linux on it, following those instructions would take less than five minutes. Easy.

For a typical Android user, they wouldn't know what they were looking at even if they had a Linux machine, which they don't. And would then get turned around by a simple typo like "apt-get-install" instead of "apt-get install" if they even make the attempt.

But because it's already "easy" for the people with the expertise to make it easier, the only people who could solve the problem are the people not experiencing it.

Arguably you can download SDK Platform tools much the same on Windows/Mac.

This command does not however always work (or at least wouldn't for some bundled software in older Androids).

> the only people who could solve the problem are the people not experiencing it.

Its more that companies provide some hard to use escape hatch for their anti features which silences all criticism "You just run this command" while still keeping it out of the hands of the normal user. The problem has already been solved, you don't have to run abd to remove apps on android, unless the app is specifically preventing you from using this feature.

I generally agree with you, nonetheless someone just released this:

https://github.com/A2L5E0X1/debloat-adb

Sometimes the scripts on xda-developers come bundled with an older adb version specifically because they don't expect people to know how to install it themselves.

Although, on a second thought if a user then decides to run the `debloat-google.sh` without knowing what he does the user might end up quite frustrated as a result. So I guess you're right.

I think google has been gradually restricting what adb is able to do.

Given the billions of Android devices in the developing world, "typical Android user" possibly doesn't have a computer at all.

This could be done by a service person in a mobile repair / paraphernalia shop.

> A friend of mine used to say "Is your grandma so senile that she can't type `configure; make; make install`?"

Who writes makefiles such that 'make install' doesn't have 'all' (or whatever the default target is) as a dependency? It's even mean these days not to automatically configure with the default options if no configuration has previously been specified.

Thus grandma should really only have to do the much simpler

    (mkdir /tmp/granny; cd /tmp/granny; curl https://my.example.com/download/latest.gz|tar xfpBz - ; cd * ; make install)

I can't believe grandma is so oblivious to security she'd just blindly download and build a random tarball without manually inspecting the code for backdoors.

How has she made it this far in life?

Damn thing was probably written in Ruby and she can't keep up with the times. Be kind, and only send her links to packages in something simpler like C++ or CommonLisp.

granny misses the simplicity and readability of COBOL

I really hate this concept of preinstalling apps on the phone that cannot be uninstalled/disabled. Especially crap apps like Facebook and Instagram. Why o why I cannot remove Facebook or Instagram when I don't even use it anymore.

And this is even worse with brands like Oppo. They have good hardware but so much crap wasting battery and cpu running on by default which cannot be disabled or uninstalled.

I was able to disable/uninstall with adb a lot of it but with every "Security update" it gets right back on the phone and then I have to do it all over again (SOs phone). Also it's getting more and more restrictive and even adb fails on half of these apps like Game center, etc nowadays :/

By and large they aren't full apps, they're small shims, but ultimately this a decision that Google took when they started misusing the system designation for apps to mean all of "should come back on hard reset" and "should have full admin permissions beyond userland" and "should be difficult to remove because you'll bork the OS services" at the same time.

I've no problem with the basic concept of built-in apps that provide a standard base set of capabilities. For example I'm fine with Microsoft putting a default browser in Windows 10 that you can't uninstall, or Apple building Safari into iOS. User unintentionally deleting the app and from their POV getting locked out of the internet would be bound to happen.

On the other hand clearly carriers and vendors loading up their products with crapware and junk is a serious problem. Lets be clear though, this is about poor judgement, bad execution and incentives that are severely miss-aligned between vendor and customer. It's not fundamentally a technical issue.

You may want to warm up your SO to a something like lineage os. Hoping they haven't gotten too spoilt by Oppo's tools, banking and netflix pretty much work okay on these alternative softwares.

Better else - disable

  adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.samsung.android.email.provider

Why disabling is better than remove/uninstall?

You can't uninstall what was burned into the OEM ROM, only disable them so they no longer run nor get updates.

I recently learned that the uninstall cmd doesn't uninstall the app from the phone but only for the user. This may come handy if you uninstall something by mistake, say, an essential service. Forgot the reinstall cmd but it's easy to find.

I don't believe you can uninstall OEM apps from the drive of the phone unless you have root permission.

As another comment mentioned, you can disable them for the single user over adb. On my sony phone you can disable OEM apps the same place you'd normally uninstall them in the GUI.

It took some clicking (tapping?), but I disabled a bunch of cruft 2 years ago when I bought the phone and haven't had any issues.

... or, of course, hit the phone repeatedly with a hammer.

Not sure if this should be taken seriously or in jest!

First, thank you for the tip. I'd tried this a while back and it didn't work; I didn't realize you needed the --user flag! That said, one nitpick:

> any app

I was not able to uninstall the Samsung Pay Framework (com.samsung.android.spayfw) with this method; it hangs forever. Trying to uninstall via the gui tells me that it cannot be uninstalled since it is required by the device administrator. Going to the device administrator screen shows nothing enabled, so I cannot disable whatever is preventing the uninstall.

This kind of shit makes me really wish I had donated more to all of the pure linux phone projects of the past. They call this thing a smart "phone" but the "phone" part is the least advanced thing about it. Smart means it runs a bunch of apps but none of them actually advance what a phone should do: namely record calls - with auto prompts to make it legal, block spam.

Instead I'm inundated with societal shit: amber and silver alerts at 2am (yes I have been woken up when my phone was on silent in the middle of the fucking night. What the fuck am I going to do while I'm boondocking in the middle of the ari-fucking-zona desert to help a child abducted by a dad at 2 am in the state of Washington - but the parent's are originally from Phoenix?)

I'm so damn sick of Android.

I don't think they were looking for serious advice on removing the icons, but simply lamenting how absurd it is that multiple of the default apps on a phone released nine months ago are now broken.

I don't know about the great grandparent comment's author, but for me this info is both interesting and potentially useful. Thanks, grandparent comment!

No need for root?

Works without root

I also use Pixel 3a as my main phone, despite having an employer-provided iPhone.

The only killer app that still keeps me on Android is Firefox with uBlock Origin. If Apple allowed functional 3rd party browsers, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

3rd party browser on iOS with web notifications (like android) would translate into a huge profit loss in app sales.

Content blockers for Safari are basically the same, but with the added bonus of stronger fingerprinting protection from Mobile Safari than Firefox due to the hundreds of millions of iOS users.

You can also combine that with a DNS-level ad-blocking pseudo-VPN running on the device (like a pi-hole but without the pi). That gets rid of most in-app ads and a ton of tracking.

Yep, you could set it up via https://apple.nextdns.io/

Aren't content blockers limited in some regard? I think I read that one content blocker can only have a limited list of blocks.

uBlock on Firefox doesn't have that limitation, and if you use Firefox on desktop you can important synchronization between those.

Yes and no. Content blockers have a limited number of rules and you’re fundamentally limited by the expressiveness of the filtering language.

But:

* The filtering language is basically just ABP rules.

* There is only a cap per “extension” so apps with lots of rules just expose many extensions.

Safari content blockers are significantly limited compared to ublock origin. You're limited to domain allow/deny rules, and a quite small amount of those per app (less than a couple hundred thousand I think) and IIRC can't inject cosmetic filters either. These are critical drawbacks.

Afaik I can block all cookies or advertising cookies, I can rotate my ID, block all pop-ups, and or sit behind a Pi-Hole. Some ideas for switching.

Also, the qualitative experience, subjective as it is, is so much higher for me, having owned both Android and Apple.

That said I wish open source phones with Linux were a thing (not just Purism, but popular in general)

Consider WebKit with 1Blocker: https://1blocker.com/

It depends if you want to hack around on the phone.

Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:

- you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

- there are no custom apps that could do phone tracking (it is available to find my device) e.g. like GPSLogger on Android

Can you integrate a ~smart/dumb watch to do action that you want? (e.g. send a http request, make a call)?

Basically iPhone doesn't have Tasker like functionality and for me that is a no go.

Also is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?

> Also is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?

The iPhone does have a search for apps. Plus they now also will group your apps into categories on the last screen.

And apps like Google Photos on the iPhone do upload photos in the background.

They do upload in the background, but they don't notice new photos while being in the background.

You need to start the app and only then they will notice the new photos. (my life is miserable because my wife has iPhone and I have to deal with strange limits on iOS).

>Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:

You are very much behind the times here. The newer Android (since 10 I think?) behavior for the last 2 years are permission prompts just like Apple. In fact many apps are not allowed to request background location updates anymore either.

But there are still apps that have permission to run location service in the background e.g. Tasker, GPSLogger.

I'm on Android 11.

> - you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can. I use PhotoSync to upload my photos in the background to my Nextcloud server via WebDav. Nextcloud and Dropbox have their own special functionality to automatically upload photos in the background.

> you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can certainly upload/sync to your personal NAS at home with third-party apps. Many of my beta users use Resilio Sync, PhotoSync, or SyncThing. Synology and QNAP both have their own proprietary sync apps as well.

Nope, it does not work. Tried it, it appears to work for first time and then you notice that if the app is not launched in the foreground after you take a photo it won't notice it.

I use AdGuard Pro on an iPhone and it blocks all ads in Safari.

I also own a Pixel phone. I can confirm that Google Play Music now does nothing but tell you that it's discontinued, cannot be uninstalled, and takes up over 50 MB, which is egregious. However, Google Photos still works as the local photo gallery. I'm not sure why you'd expect to be able to uninstall it.

If it's an "app" I would expect to be able to uninstall it and install my own.

If it's a basic operating system functionality (dealing with files, viewing photos) it's fine if you can't uninstall it, but then it better not come with any kind of separate user agreement, separate updates, changes in functionality, upselling attempts etc.

> If it's a basic operating system functionality (dealing with files, viewing photos) it's fine if you can't uninstall it, but then it better not come with any kind of separate user agreement, separate updates, changes in functionality, upselling attempts etc.

Which is the case for Google Photos. It is also a messenger (not kidding), shows notifications with "moments" it automatically created from your photos, lets you create photo books which you can order and so on.

I would prefer a smaller default gallery app with Google Photos being an optional extra.

Why do you expect that? I've never seen a smartphone that behaved how you expect. Except for stuff like the pinephone, which couldn't be used as a phone for awhile.

I mean, that's the point: the smartphone ecosystem is broken. It was built wrong in the first place.

Some missinformation on my side:

I checked the Google Photos app and opened my account settings. According to the information in the app, free & unlimited storage of photos in "high" (not original) quality will still be available for me after June 1st 2021. But uploads from other devices will count toward the available space quota.

So Google Photos works as always on the Google Pixel 3a.

This is the actual state of google and android right now. Not missing my pixel 2.

This may be a stupid question ("why not eat cake instead") but why not install LineageOS on it?

It's a clean Android and it's utterly well supported on the Pixel line of phones.

Google only supports these phones for a few years. That is useless to me, who intend to use my tools for much longer than that. LineageOS has provided that support with a minimum of fuss.

I'm still bitter about Google Play Music being killed for YouTube Music. YouTube Music has been worse in every single way.

Pixel 3a is well supported by Lineageos, I recommend installing it, though the Google Pixel cam app is indeed hard coded to only open previews in Google Photos, not any other gallery.

What part of Google Photos is discontinued?

Unlimited storage?

The unlimited plan

I think he means that uploads beyond your free Google storage are not free anymore, not even for Pixel users.

Isn't it grandfathered in though?

Photos stored in original quality are counted towards your max, only photos in reduced quality taken with a Pixel device are grandfathered and do not count.

I think all photos with reduced quality are grandfathered.

I'm pretty sure they changed that just recently.

https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/

> Starting June 1, 2021, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member.

> Any photos or videos you’ve uploaded in High quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward your 15GB of free storage. This means that photos and videos backed up before June 1, 2021 will still be considered free and exempt from the storage limit.

Maybe we understand the word differently, but to me that says that (existing) high-quality photos are indeed grandfathered (they will not suddenly start using your quota), just not new ones you upload after June.

Correct.

Reading further up this comment chain:

"I think he means that uploads beyond your free Google storage are not free anymore, not even for Pixel users."

Future photos, after June, will not be "grandfathered". Only existing ones are. This is the part of the service that has been canceled.

Great, way to screw your users and strongarm them into paying for storage. I'm salty.

This. This is one of the biggest reasons I switched to iPhone.

I just uninstalled Google Music by dragging it to the trash on my Pixel 4a. I'm super annoyed about the YouTube music switcheroo myself fwiw

Wow so Google Play Music won't even play MP3s, crazy. I never quite realized it was more than a music player.

Install grapheneos! My pixel 3a is rocking it, yours should too ;)

I have a pixel 3 and it's fine. I don't use google apps and it serves me well. There are dozens of replacement services and apps out there and that's a good thing

You can probably get Google Play Music working with local mp3s if you reset to the factory version of the app and disable auto updates(worked on my Pixel 3).

Interesting. Now that you mention this, it makes sense. It worked as an offline MP3 player before if I remember correctly. Quite unfortunate that they decided to remove this functionallity as well with the update.

planned software obsolescence ?

This is dishonest. When you bought the Pixel 3a it was never advertised to feature unlimited storage so from that angle, nothing changed for you and Photos is still the same product.

I wasn't actually sure so I looked it up. According to wayback machine, it was indeed advertised:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210104200400/https://store.goo...

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