Bloatware and Samsung, How to get rid of them for good
The story of bloatware in Samsung phones is an unkind one. Ever since the early TouchWiz days, Samsung used to bundle a lot of unwanted apps ‘bloatware’ on its phone. They sometimes had an equivalent copy of every app that google had, even bundling their own Email app alongside Google’s Gmail.
Things got so bad that Samsung phones, particularly in the lower end were called “Hangsungs” by the disgruntled users. The public opinion on TouchWiz and Samsung's performance woes got so bad that Samsung eventually had to dump TouchWiz in its entirety and embrace a new UI overhaul called Samsung Experience. It was a cleaner and more minimalistic approach to the UI that became an instant success. Samsung had finally realized that cramming more and more features into a phone made absolutely no sense when no one was using it, mainly after the initial novelty wore off.
One of the catalysts of this transformation was the market success of phones sporting vanilla stock android. Remember the first-gen moto series? Cheap ones that just costed around $120 were running laps around Samsung flagships in terms of responsiveness and snappiness.
Fast forward to 2018 and we get One UI, the successor to Samsung Experience. A welcome upgrade that improved the performance and included a more refined user interface from Android 9 Pie onwards.
Samsung and External Bloatware
From One UI, particularly OneUI 3, Samsung started to aggressively bundle third-party apps with their phones. Something that we had only seen previously in lower-end phones of MI and such. What’s worse is that these apps install themselves automatically with the help of an inbuilt Samsung app called “Appcloud”. Uninstalling is just a temporary solution as they install themselves back periodically. There is no option for users to opt out of this behavior somehow.
A lot of these apps are installed when during the initial setup of the phone, with more to come once an internet connection is available. The user has absolutely no provision to stop these from being installed as you cannot even get to the home screen without accepting the terms to have it installed. See the below screenshot of the initial setup of a Samsung A50 running OneUI 3.
Once the phone connects to a network, more bloatware shows up, again, there is no option for the user to prevent this. Just after 5 minutes of the initial setup, this is the state of my app drawer, keep in mind that I’ve not even logged in to play store or the Galaxy store yet.
Glance — An ad server masquerading as a wallpaper service
Glance is a bundled software in Samsung phones that gives you new and exciting wallpapers every time you turn on your phone. Except that every “glance” wallpaper has a small embedded ad which is just another way for Samsung to monetize their customers after they have already sold them a phone. Just like the purpose of the auto-installed bloatware.
Getting rid of the bloatware for good
Samsung makes really good hardware, no doubt about it. Yet, no user should have to jump through all these hoops to get their phone free of useless apps, but that's what it has gotten to now.
And here’s how to get rid of them,
The bloatware is installed using an inbuilt Samsung service called App cloud. Disabling this app from the settings menu will prevent bloatware from auto-installing. One caveat of this method is that it may automatically enable itself after a software update. There is another method that will uninstall this app from the phone itself, keep reading to find out how at the end.
- Go to Settings -> Apps.
- Find the app named “AppCloud”.
- Tap on the “Disable” button at the bottom.
- Tap on the “Disable app” button in the confirmation dialog.
Once AppCloud has been disabled, you can go back to your app drawer and uninstall all the unwanted apps as you like.
Disabling Glance wallpaper service
Like previously mentioned, Glance is a third-party wallpaper service that is also used to serve ads on the lock screen of Samsung devices. To disable it, follow these steps.
- Go to Settings -> Lock screen -> Wallpaper services
- Tap on “None”
Permanently remove AppCloud and all other apps that cannot be uninstalled
If you noticed the settings page of Appcloud, so can see that there is no uninstall option for it. It is the same for other bundled apps such as Onedrive, Facebook, My Galaxy, Samsung Max, Duo, etc
To remove these apps, we’ll have to connect the phone to a computer and run the ADB utility. ADB or “Android Debug Bridge” is a utility by Google used by android developers to debug and test the functionalities of their apps. By using ADB, we get elevated access on the phone that can be used to uninstall apps that are normally not uninstallable by the user.
Note that ADB is an advanced utility that requires a bit of caution from the user as it’s possible to mess up your phone (nothing a factory reset can’t fix) if you don’t know what you’re doing.
If you still want to proceed, let’s get started.
- Download the official Android platform tools archive that contains the adb utility from here. Make sure to download the correct version corresponding to your operating system. From now on here the guide will assume you are using Windows.
- Extract the archive to a folder of your choice.
- Now, open that folder, shift + right click on empty space and choose “Open powershell window here”
4. Before executing commands from adb, we need to enable the “USB Debugging” option in the phone.
To enable it, go to Settings -> About phone -> Software Information
In that page, find the text that says “Build number”. Now, tap on that build number seven times. Confirm your screen lock during the prompt and then finally you’ll get a dialogue saying “Developer Mode has been enabled”.
Now go back to the settings menu and you’ll find a new menu item called “Developer options” at the bottom. Tap on it and in the new menu, scroll down and enable “USB debugging”. Tap ok in the confirmation dialog that pops up.
5. Now it’s time to plug in your phone to the PC with a USB cable.
6. After plugging in the phone, type ./adb devicesin the powershell window that we opened before and press enter.
7. You should now get a dialogue on the phone which says “Allow USB debugging”. Check the “Always allow from this computer” checkbox and tap on “Allow” button.
8. Now type in ./adb shell and press enter. Now you should see a ‘$’ symbol near the cursor. We are now within the adb shell where we can modify app packages.
9. To uninstall specific apps, type in pm uninstall --user 0 <package name of the app to uninstall> and press enter. For example, the package name of the AppCloud app is com.aura.oobe.samsung. So to uninstall it, we would type in
pm uninstall --user 0 com.aura.oobe.samsung
Press enter and the app will get uninstalled. You can do the same for other apps which cannot be uninstalled from within the phone itself. I’ll attach the package names of some apps which you may want to uninstall yourselves.
AppCloud -> com.aura.oobe.samsung
Samsung Max -> com.opera.max.oem
Microsoft Onedrive -> com.microsoft.skydrive
Samsung MyGalaxy -> com.mygalaxy
Facebook -> com.facebook.katana , com.facebook.system
Samsung Content Suggestions-> samsung.android.alive.service, samsung.android.aliveprivacyIf you want uninstall some other apps that you don’t know the package name, APKinfo from playstore is an app that’ll list all the apps and the corresponding package names.
Reinstalling uninstalled apps again
Now for some reason if you run into problems or want your uninstalled apps back, just replace uninstall with install-existing in the above commands. All the other commands remain the same.
For example, if you want to reinstall the AppCloud, type in
pm install-existing --user 0 com.aura.oobe.samsungThanks for reading!
