Much of the software on new phones is useless and closed source. Many simple apps such as clock are re-skinned and made closed source. Some apps are pre-installed on phones and are usually very annoying. To change this, I made this small shell/python script I could run when I get a new phone that would remove the bloatware or disable any unnecessary apps.
It's very simple, the shell script reads from bloatware.json and if the user agrees either disables or removes the bloatware. In the future, I want this script to also install software (with the user's permission) from F-droid.
Clone the repo and run the shell script using
bash start.sh
or for the python script use
python3 start.py
You need two requirements for these scripts:
To install these requirements, run this command on your device:
sudo apt-get install jq adb
sudo pacman -S jq adb
I'm not sure how you install packages on Windows, as I don't use it any more, so I will link the two requirements webpages
The bloatware lists are from pre-existing online lists. Not every app has a description, usually because I don't know what it is.
Every app in these lists are either bloatware or just really peculiar (i.e. weird permissions).
If disabling a package broke some part of your device, you can simply re-enable the app using this command:
adb shell pm enable $(PACKAGE_NAME)
Note: You need adb and have USB debugging enabled
- More bloatware added to lists
- option for enabling disabled apps (already done on python)
- installing open source equivalent to bloatware using fdroid (maybe possible)
- add arguments for the command line