[HOW TO] Remove bloatware

[Zael]

Question: Can this be done using a free terminal editor like pTerminal and su? I tried last night, but I got an error when remounting system as read/write. At the moment I am not sure if it is something I did or some sort of weakness in pTerminal.

[Fanatic1074]

Guys i have been messing with my wife's Droid X trying to get a few things working right, and im pretty positive all this Blur crap is causing my issues. First thing is that she hates and i hate the way the messaging is setup. She wants it like native android. Second is facebook is suppose to update all your contacts with pictures, well thats not working either. And the third thing is the gallary, its terrible, can someone show me how to get the native android gallary back? Thanks in advance.

[Zael]

Question: Can this be done using a free terminal editor like pTerminal and su? I tried last night, but I got an error when remounting system as read/write. At the moment I am not sure if it is something I did or some sort of weakness in pTerminal.

Posting in case anybody else has interest on doing this from their phone instead of through ADB, but would like to do it for free. pTerminal will not work. In pTerminal, even with super user access, the mount operation is not permitted (I don't know why myself); however, connectbot offers a local connection option (connect to your phone). If this is used with su, mount operations can be performed and packages in the /system/app directory can be renamed/removed.

[jayba420]

well, I've had my DX for about a month and the f'ing cityID app is in my face about purchasing now that my trial is up.... so I broke-down and rooted using abd method... i don't know why i waited so long. Installed Titanium backup and froze the app and presto, upon reboot it was gone from the app draw and no sign of it anymore. hank you for all the help found in the thorough guides on this site. to anyone who is skittish about rooting and removing bloatware... don't hesitate!

thanks

[bad4u]

So now with an sbf out, whats the most everyone has removed? Whos removed all the blur?!?

[fwaggle]

Question: Can this be done using a free terminal editor like pTerminal and su? I tried last night, but I got an error when remounting system as read/write. At the moment I am not sure if it is something I did or some sort of weakness in pTerminal.

I did this just fine without any purchased Apps - I used "Android Terminal Emulator" by Jack Palevich. I downloaded the exploid files on my desktop, and extracted them over USB to the android, then did everything on the android with 100% free tools.

Rooting the phone worked first shot once I realized my dumbass was turning GPS on/off instead of WiFi on/off.

One caveat I did notice was that the android terminal emulator (like ConnectBot) doesn't seem to accept backspaces from swype, so I have to switch to the multi-touch keyboard before I do anything shell/ssh related, unless I don't make any mistakes

Also, coming from a UNIX-like OS background, I don't think sync does entirely what you think it does. sync just commits any delayed I/O to disk (synchronizes what's in memory to what's physically on the disk), which for what we're doing here probably just amounts to flushing any caches. It wasn't necessary for me to do it to have the apps not show up next time in the App list (given that android's primary target for disk I/O is solid state, and android phones aren't exactly swimming with RAM compared to a Linux PC, I'm not even sure if it'd bother to cache - if it doesn't cache I'm pretty sure sync will do virtually nothing at all in this situation), though I suppose it can't hurt.

Thanks for the thread though - I probably wouldn't have bothered rooting if there were a way to uninstall this crapware (like I have to do with my XP desktop every time I do a factory restore).

[topdj]

I rooted and used file explorer, I then just renamed 6 or 7 bloatwares to BAK
I now notice a longer battery life

[csantoro85]

So I deleted a few of them instead of renaming them. So I re-added them now, but they are not showing up in the Root Explorer when I go to switch them from .apk to .bak. Anyone have any ideas of how to fix this?

[richjacksonkc]

..hope this isn't a repeat but it should really be edited into that second post...

I guess that people are breaking the market when they uninstall gtalk and gtalkservice so be aware of this issue.. don't know if it breaks 3rd party market apps like appbrain, or just the stock market...

[bcollins33]

After removing some apps the Android app market would not work until I reinstalled them all.

Any way around this?