Removing Bloatware from your Android device

I recently bought an Android tablet whose specification, according to the box, included 4 GB of inbuilt ROM. I was disappointed to discover that of this only 890 MB was actually available whilst the rest was shared between pre-installed Apps and some pre-loaded Asian music videos.

You can hardly expect to have the entire quoted ROM memory available to you since some of it is reserved for the system but you would not be unreasonable to expect at least 2 GB of memory to be available to you on a device with 4 GB. While the music videos were easy to get rid of, the stock Apps did not have an uninstall option available.

Regardless of how you got your Android devices: be it a sourced Chinese tablet, an unlocked one your cousin send from Diaspora or even an locally branded one chances are that your OEM, despite their best intentions, loaded a lot of Apps that you will be unlikely to use and are thus just a waste of precious real estate.

Take the above picture for example, since AT&T is a mobile carrier restricted to the U.S. you are unlikely going to need the AT&T hot spot app. My tablet had WeChat, Facebook and a host of other apps wasting precious space.

Getting Rid of the bloatware

There are many ways to get rid of bloatware but I would recommend the method detailed below because whilst it allows you to uninstall every App you don’t want from your phone/tablet it will also prevent you from breaking your device by telling you which software is part of the core Apps and which you can remove without breaking anything.

• Root your device using KingoRoot as detailed here.
• Once your device is rooted install the System App Remover from here.
• If for whatever reason you device cannot go online so that you can install the app you can download the apk file onto you desktop and then move it to your device and install it. This can be done by visiting the page in step two above, copying the full URL, visiting the website here, pasting the URL in the provided text-box and downloading the apk.
• Once the System App Remover is installed on your device launch it.
• You will be prompted to grant Root privileges to the app, tap on Grant otherwise the app will not work as intended
• Once the app has been launched you will be presented with a list of all the apps on your device as well as a coloured commentary in [Square Brackets] telling you of the effect of removing an app. Most bloatware is marked in Green with the words “Could Remove” although some Apps might not have a commentary. You can remove all the Apps without a commentary and marked in green as Could Remove without much fear of breaking your system.
• Be careful what you Remove, some Apps like the Google Play Store can be removed but make for a fuller Android experience.

NB If you break your system, even though that is unlikely, it is entirely your fault, if it helps then all the praise is mine.

Image Credit: The Unlockr