I found Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify on my home, yet I never even visited their websites on this phone. I never recently installed or visited sus places, I ran a full scan with Kaspersky, found nothing. I disabled “MetaAppInstall” from the settings. I have a Redmi Note 12 Pro. I did some googling and it says for Facebook that it’s because of sponsorship. Is this it? You literally can’t escape from those apps even by never looking at them because your phone will force them on you? Or is there some other reason? Edit: I can uninstall them, and I did. It’s just that they installed themselves and I don’t want them to do it again
You can escape from them by rooting your phone and installing a different OS. If you don’t do that, you’re at the whim of Xiaomi and its corporate deals.
Installing another OS is not without risk and requires some technical skills though.
what would you reccomend that has a similar enough look to MIUI? I really like the style but goddamn having ads in the file explorer is too much. I ran away from that by using adguard but if your phone will install apps for you…
I don’t think you’d necessarily need a new OS to be honest. Once you’re rooted, you can just use your root privileges to uninstall any system/non-system app you want using one of several available apps. As for ads, I don’t have Xiaomi but you can try these.
Be careful about researching rooting your phone carefully. Some financial apps may not work on it. On some phones, once the phone is rooted, it can’t be unrooted.
If you can’t just uninstall them then disable them in the settings but occasionally they do come back if there are major updates to them and your Google Play is set to auto-update all apps, I’ve never had that since disabling the apps I don’t want though.
Rooting your phone might not be a good idea as it can disable things like banking apps, secure folders and such, there are supposedly ways to hide your root but I never got them to work on my banking app and unrooting won’t fix that if you have a digital fuse on your phone (samsung has these and once they’re tripped they can’t be un-tripped).
I think you can use ADB without rooting to uninstall apps that can’t be done via the UI but you’ll need a seperate computer to do this. Have a look at this link but, as always, do some research on the subject rather than taking a strangers word:
I found that changing the region of these devices can significantly change which apps gets installed.
Once I set a Xiaomi phone to “Italy” and it immediately started installing all the usual suspect apps Xiaomi had sponsorship deals with. Then just for fun I switched to “Israel” and almost all of them disappeared, apparently due to some local consumer protection laws or lack of sponsorship for this region, idk
In other words: these sponsorship deals seem to be highly localized.
I was able to uninstall all those preinstalled apps with my Redmi note 10, maybe something changed with the newer models.
You don’t even need to root your phone to remove them. Just Google “adb remove apps” and you should be able to find guides on how you can do it via command line on a PC through USB connection to your phone.
Even a PC isn’t strictly necessary. You can do the same right on that phone, but it takes more effort