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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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!

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.

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 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!

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.

No need for root?

Works without root

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