When you buy and launch a new smartphone, unless it’s a pure Android like Google’s Pixels, you’ll most likely find yourself a few pre-installed apps from the manufacturer.
These applications can be the typical useful tools like a recorder, a note taking app or a weather app just to name a few common examples. But among all this preinstalled stuff, we also find a lot of bloatware.
Bloatware is all those third-party applications, like games and “filler” applications, that clutter up your phone and that you don’t need at all. The downside is that in many cases, they cannot even be uninstalled using traditional methods.
How to uninstall bloatware and other pre-installed apps on Android without root
In addition to bloatware, there are other pre-installed apps and system tools that cannot be easily uninstalled. If we enter the settings of these apps, we will see that The Uninstall button is disabled.
In such situations, the procedure is the same as that we have already explained on other occasions: Perform a manual uninstall using commands through a terminal window.
On a Windows PC, this can be accomplished by running a few PowerShell commands. It’s a bit more complicated on Android requires connecting the mobile device to a PC to launch all these commands remotely.
The good news is that this is possible. no need to root the phone, which is always a plus (especially now that few people root their phones anymore). We just have to run a few ADB commands from the PC and make sure we meet the following requirements.
- Second, install the ADB package on the PC to allow Windows to detect the commands to run.
- At last, connect your Android device to the PC using a USB cable.
Now that we have everything ready, it’s time to start the commands.
- Open a terminal window or “Command Prompt” by pressing the Win + R keys.
- Navigate to the folder where you just installed the ADB files.
- Enter the command “ADB devices“.
- On the screen of your Android device, you will see a message that says “Allow USB debugging?”. Click on “To allow“.
- When the PC recognizes the device, it will show us its identification number on the screen.
- Now run the command “adb shell pm list packages -f“. This will show us a list of all the apps installed on the phone.
The list of apps is organized by package, and each package shows the following information: App location in internal storage + package name.
For example the result “Package:/data/app/~~dvP1XGInrjd2rcgvXMuXhg==/com.spotify.music-Z8yNnMA-_LZIwWq_QEi8pw==/base.apk=com.spotify.music‘ tells us that the Spotify app package is called “com.spotify.music”.
Note: In this example we will uninstall the Spotify app, but if you want to uninstall another app, just make note of its package name.
Now that we know the official name of the app we want to uninstall, let’s run the following adb command:
- uninstall adb application pack where app_package is the name of the app package. For example, if we wanted to uninstall Spotify, the command to enter would be “adb uninstall com.spotify.music”
If the uninstallation has been completed correctly, we will see a message that says “Success”.
Having trouble finding an app’s package name?
In case we’re having trouble identifying an app’s exact package name We can use the App Inspector app.
It’s a free tool that allows us to get all this information in a much more direct and visual way.
Finally remember if you have root permissions on your android device You can also uninstall any app using a tool like System App Remover.
This application allows you to uninstall system apps and all kinds of bloatware from your device (a more detailed guide on how it works is HERE). Of course, remember that removing an app from the system is always a delicate process and it can cause your smartphone to malfunction. If you are unsure, it is best not to hot uninstall anything.