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Zombieball | 6 years ago

Are you sure about that? On an iPhone I can delete three of those apps (just verified). Android doesn’t allow the same?

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ShamelessC|6 years ago

Sadly, it depends. Many manufacturers have deals in place with Facebook, etc to prevent the un-installation of these apps. At best you can "disable" them completely, achieving the same effective result. Any downloaded updates to the app will be removed and it will be _supposedly_ incapable of running in the background. I suspect however that there are also other e.g. Facebook services running in the background that need to be explicitly disabled with Android running in developer mode.

This isn't a problem if you have a rooted device, but root is difficult/impossible to obtain on certain devices (like Samsung's Galaxy 8 onward) due to enterprise level tamper-proofing.

Having said all that, I just got an unlocked Pixel 4 and it has zero of that bloat. If you happen to consider the Google services themselves bloat/tracking (they often are), rooting is fully supported which allows you to install an Android distribution without any Google services.

Reelin|6 years ago

Unfortunately it's complicated. There are many OEMs, and each configures things to their liking. Then there are carrier branding deals which (often) result in per-carrier customizations on top of that.

Typically, "uninstallable" apps can be disabled via adb commands if you don't want to (or can't) flash a custom ROM. Sometimes they can't however - for example, Amazon sells subsidized phones that display advertisements on the lock screen.