Debloat non-rooted Android devices • Hacker News Board

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#171

Post by l33tman » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:05 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #18

I bought -- full price, retail -- a midrange Samsung phone for a relative recently. The amount of bloatware was incredible. Various social networks and shopping apps were preinstalled. In addition to all the Samsung apps that more or less duplicate the Google stack, poorly. The entire setup process was full of dark patterns designed to extract as much data from you as possible. No way a regular person gets through th…

Weird, I've had Samsungs flagship phones since 10 years back and never had any app on them that would be considered bloatware. There are a bunch of low-key note-taking apps etc that you can just ignore. Like another poster wrote, maybe it's a US-thing?

I actually use the Samsung web browser, because it allows ad-blocking out of the box, which Chrome on Android won't allow...

I've always used gboard as a keyboard (googles keyboard) and disabled the options to get really predictive and smart as I'm sure that makes it learn more closely and potentially send back data to google etc.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#172

Post by rchaud » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:05 PM UTC

geraldhh wrote: post #164

rchaud wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Samsung lives and dies off their huge marketing budget. This is a ridiculous take. Samsung is the entire reason Android didn't go the way of WebOS and Windows Phone. Samsung had pressure-sensitive pen support on Android 5 years before iOS. Samsung DEX desktop environment can turn my phone into a proper work machine with just a USB-C display cable and a lapdock. They've also had folding phones that can turn your pho…

is dex actually useful? it sounds fantastic hence i suppose there is a catch

Yes it is. Floating window support makes a big difference for actual multitasking. In Dex you can also drag and drop files and images, which is not supported on Android. Considering that you can use Termux for web dev work, with a proper desktop environment, it becomes an actual computer instead of a locked down Google Docs type of device.

The catch with Dex is that it's only offered on the high end models: Galaxy S and Galaxy Z Fold series phones.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#173

Post by 1oooqooq » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:06 PM UTC

jkhanlar wrote: post #145

Kind of related, a few weeks ago I've been thinking to myself what happened to the open source free software operating system developments for mobile devices? Specifically, how are operating system environments such as GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, etctera, only able to be used on a single company's (Alphabet Inc) manufactured phone devices and not any other devices and where are the operating systems that work on as many…

> how are operating system environments such as GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, etctera

There are ZERO open source OS for mobile. ZERO. NONE.

even the ones you list doesn't have access to essential drivers. What do they do? they get the driver as binary blobs from the original image, and just ship them. So all those projects are 1) full of closed source kernel drivers. 2) stuck on a specific kernel version to be able to use those binary drivers.

So the MOST those open source versions can do, is set a different set of "system apps" everything else must be the same as the closed source OS. It's barely more than theming in practice.

> compiling all the hardware variations to have drivers and support for practically everything for everyone to get mostly the same experience regardless of which hardware they use

Again, there is ZERO open source on those. All you need to support device X is a root exploit so you can get the binary blobs. Done. Now you can ship to that device.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#174

Post by 1oooqooq » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

jkhanlar wrote: post #153

jkhanlar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example https://androidauthority.com/grapheneos-3287030/ > "Even if you stomach the Pixel-only requirement" I have not and will not stomach that at all. Nope! https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices Nope! I wasn't paying attention, but if I remember, Alphabet/Google was funded to deploy/release Android operating system, and they also were financed to deploy some hardware phones before disappearing to let oth…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating... > "Base system is open source, but many devices use proprietary drivers for hardware support, and most Android operating systems include Proprietary apps (such as Google Play and other Google apps)." Okay, so, look at history of AMD GPus and NVIDIA GPUs for proprietary linux drivers and open source/free software alternative drivers that even without the…

first you have wrong facts about the open source drivers for gpus timeline. They are still not 100% complete, and only were usable last couple years.

Second you forget that while not supporting full 3d performance on those gpu, you still had at least a 2d framebuffer to use your system.

On mobile, Without those blobs, the CPU doesn't initialize. The bootloader won't pass some signature safeboot check. The radio won't turn on. Wifi and bluetooth won't work. The screen won't display anything. the digitalizer won't work. no battery charging. usb into otg? nope. etc etc etc.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#175

Post by 1oooqooq » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:13 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #61

Related Android equivalent commands used in this project: `dpkg --get-selections`: `adb shell pm list packages | sort` `dpkg -r `: `adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 ` edit: to hide status bar icons(may be version dependent): 1) `adb shell dumpsys activity service SystemUIService` 2) search for "icon slots: " and note down names 3) `adb shell settings put secure icon_blacklist battery,wifi,clock, ...` (blacklist is…

There's lot of undocumented things you can do with those, which the developers include because of their own itches. For example, i know most of the android and pixel core team at google have toggles for wifi and data. But they shipped a single quick setting tile for both. Yet there is a hidden setting to bring the two tile mode back.

why that happens at google so often?

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#176

Post by brookst » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #142

yard2010 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the future. It will be A cyberpunk dystopia just like in Cyberpunk 2077, but much sooner than 2077 IMHO.

We've been in the cyberpunk dystopia timeline for at least 10 years, maybe since the 90s.

My grandparents assured me we’ve been heading to dystopia since the invention of the television. Pretty sure their parents said the same thing about radio.

Presumably if you go far enough back you’d find warnings of dystopia applied to coming down from the trees.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#177

Post by brookst » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:23 PM UTC

hughesjj wrote: post #67

bonki wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware support.

Lazy vendors single handedly keeping windows and android going with their lack of cross platform drivers, so frustrating....

True if you replace “lazy” with “ROI-driven”

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#178

Post by brookst » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 4:31 PM UTC

mFixman wrote: post #118

robin_reala wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What apps can’t be uninstalled on iOS?

Back when I used a iPhone for work, I remember having Safari, Apple Music, Apple Rock Band, Apple Podcasts, Apple News and a lot of built-in apps being un-uninstallable and unremovable from my home screen. Safari was the most egregious, since all other browsers had to use it as a backend.

> Safari was the most egregious, since all other browsers had to use it as a backend.

Doesn’t that exactly explain why Safari couldn’t be removed?

It’s poor design, but Safari is one of those special apps that is both UI and system component. Same thing behind the PWA mess.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#179

Post by smellf » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

rapnie wrote: post #75

morsch wrote: post #18

I bought -- full price, retail -- a midrange Samsung phone for a relative recently. The amount of bloatware was incredible. Various social networks and shopping apps were preinstalled. In addition to all the Samsung apps that more or less duplicate the Google stack, poorly. The entire setup process was full of dark patterns designed to extract as much data from you as possible. No way a regular person gets through th…

Bloatware, dark patterns, opted-in privacy invasions, and unavoidable privacy infringement.. I feel that Samsung is somewhere in the top of that spectrum. Which commodity Android device vendor has the least of that out-of-the-box?

Don't know how it compares to other manufacturers, but I've been pretty happy with the minimal BS that comes on my last two Sony phones.

Re: Debloat non-rooted Android devices

#180

Post by midasz » Sun, Mar 17, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

smusamashah wrote: post #9

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #7

Why? You can disable apps from right there on the phone, what does this add over doing that? The FAQ makes some mention of further "uninstalling" them from the user profiles (and deleting cache/data, which you can also do in the settings), but it's not clear to me what that means.

On Android TV you can not disable/uninstall the default ad filled launcher without adb.

I just did yesterday on a new chromecast Google TV thingy with the inbuilt function of Projectivy launcher. Installed the launcher, checked the box in settings and now even when restarting I don't see the default launcher.