Privacy

Shady behavior from pre-installed apps! Bloatware on new android devices

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Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot & OpenAI Dall-E 3

This is part two of a three part series on the bloatware problem that plagues Samsung Galaxy smartphones & Android in general.

Part one dove into

  • Why pre-installed apps are not a pleasant experience you the user
  • How it's kinda annoying to be served ads on a product you paid good money to acquire
  • Some of the flagrant examples of pre-installing apps (including how some of these pre-installed apps cannot (directly) be uninstalled by the user)

In this post, we look at some more sneaky behavior by the pre-installed apps, and how they conveniently leave behind "packages" even when they're uninstalled.

Uninstalling apps from the Galaxy Store

For reasons I'm not sure about, almost all of the pre-installed apps were on Samsung's Galaxy Store and not Google's PlayStore.
Is this a branding thing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, here we go uninstalling the apps.

Success?
Alas, no! :/
Here's a look at the number of apps still available on device.

I don't even know where to begin! :/

Really Samsung, what is the point of having SO MANY DAMN apps that you stuff on to your users. And why do you not have a simple way to uninstall them?

And it gets worse.

Sneaky sneaky Facebook!

Remember when we uninstalled Facebook from the Galaxy store?
Yeah, that was only for the giggles.

Some of the packages from Facebook continue to reside on your phone.

Here's the screenshot from ADB showing packages from Facebook (more on ADB in the next post).
They reside on your phone but do not show up in any obvious way on the list of installed apps.

package:com.facebook.services
package:com.facebook.system
package:com.facebook.appmanager
List of Facebook packages still available on device

Closing comments

This article was part 2 of a 3 article series and is intended to set the baseline for further discussions on this topic.

In the final part will cover Android Debug Bridge (adb),  where you as a user take back control by force-removing apps that don't have the usual uninstall option. Including the ones from our dear friend Facebook.

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