Genuine question here, where are people buying phones that have all of this crap installed on them?
I have only ever bought unlocked phones directly from the manufacturer (pixel, nexus) or from a retailer like best buy and I have never had any carrier crap like this and I started with the nexus one.
I just get the phone and either transfered the physical sim or transferred the sim digitally, at no point has a carrier ever had the ability or permission to install apps on my phone.
I guess maybe because I never saw the point in buying carrier locked phones and always viewed that as a weird arbitrary lockdown(like buying a car that you can only drive on certain highways), I just avoided this? Is that where the bloat ware comes in?
I bought an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer and still didn’t get the choice.
Inserting a SIM card wiped the phone and provisioned it, installing all sorts of carrier-provided apps with system-level permissions.
As far as I’ve found, there’s a few possible solutions:
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Unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM that doesn’t automatically install carrier-provided apps. (Warning: This will blow the E-fuse on Samsung devices, disabling biometrics and other features provided by their proprietary HSM).
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Manually disable the apps after they’re forcibly installed for you. Install
adbon a computer and usepm disable-user --user 0 the.app.packageon every app you don’t want. If your OEM ROM is particularly scummy, it might go out of its way to periodically re-enable some of them, though. -
Find a SIM card for a carrier that doesn’t install any apps, then insert that into a fresh phone and hope that the phone doesn’t adopt the new carrier’s apps (or wipe the phone) when you insert your actual SIM.
For me inserting a SIM of a particular carrier did not wipe the phone but did install their bloatware on reboot.
Though, using adb to manually remove (actually remove not disable) all that bloatware plus DT Ignite did the trick. I have even rebooted my device and the bloatware did not return.
