Little Weed’s smartphone was getting very slow, not allowing him to play games, with significant lag. We knew that Samsung has a lot of bloatware, so it was necessary to remove much of it. This takes a long time and lots of research. I’ve removed 31 apps so far, and the phone is running much faster now. Samsung Galaxy Ace 2x S7560M is from 2012 with 768mb ram.
Deleting Bloatware: The instructions say to use a tool called “Root Explorer”, an app in the Google Play store, but I found a different way. Boot up your Windows machine, enable USB debugging, open the Fast Boot folder, Shift and Right click, then “Open Command Window Here”, then type “adb shell”. You now have a terminal to your phone. I followed these instructions to change permissions to rw. Here is a cross-reference from XDA-developers, who do the same thing. You will need to know unix terminal. After “su”, type “mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system”, then “cd /system/apps”. From here you can rename your bloatware from .apk to .apk.bak using the mv command. This way you can undo your changes later. For example, mv Bloat.apk Bloat.apk.bak” will remove the app Bloat from your phone.
Existing Apps
SecMemo.apk S Memo records all forms of ideas instantly and freely with pictures, voice recordings, typed text, handwritten notes or drawings source
SecMemoWidget.apk
Renamed Apps:
AccuweatherDaemon.apk
AccuweatherWidget.apk
AccuweatherWidget_Main.apk
AnalogClockUnique.apk Clock Funky
BellMobileTVStub.apk
BooksTablet.apk Google Books
ChatON_MARKET_Canada.apk Chat On
ChromeBookmarksSyncAdapter.apk Synchs bookmarks to Google Chrome
DeepSea.apk Deep Sea background
DSMForwarding.apk
DSMLawmo.apk Digital Signal Modulation, use voice to control phone
DualClockAnalog.apk
DualClockDigital.apk
EdmVpnServices.apk Enterprise VPN Services
Flipboard.apk Flipboard
FotaClient.apk OTA Client
GameHub_2.0_ICS_WVGA.apk Game Hub
GameLauncher_SharkDash_Samsung_S7560M_ROGERS_ML_104.apk
GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk Google quick search
Newsstand.apk Google Newsstand
NoiseField.apk Bubbles
PGA2_SamsungKyle_GalaxyAce2X_NONPN_EN_Rogers_CA_220.apk
PGA2_Samsung_Kyle_S7560_BELL_CA_212.apk
PhaseBeam.apk Phase Beam wallpaper
PolarisViewer.apk View MS documents
SamsungApps.apk Samsung Apps
SlideShow.apk Stock photo slideshow widget
SPPPushClient_Prod.apk Samsung Push Service
SecEmail.apk.bak Email app, not GMail
SharkDash_Samsung_GT_S7560M_NONIGP_Rogers_ML_GLLive_101.apk.bak Some game
STUB_SharkDash_Samsung_GTS7560_NONIGP_BELL_ML_GLLive_101.apk
SmartcardService.apk Smartcard
SNS.apk Social, Facebook, Twitter
Sympatico.ca_release_v1.1.0.apk
TrimApp_phone.apk Trim video clips
Videos.apk Google Movies
VpnDialogs.apk VPN security
WeatherWall.apk Windy Weather
YahoonewsWidget.apk Yahoo News
YahoostockWidget.apk.bak Yahoo Finance stocks
Keep Apps
SecMms.apk MMS messaging
Talk.apk Google Talk
talkback.apk Google Accessibility tool
Unsure
Bluetooth.apk MAPServiceSamsung Related to Bluetooth, (message access profile) for Bluetooth, I think it may be used to stream SMS over Bluetooth in certain cars source
General Samsung Bloatware Lists
http://forum.xda-developers.com/note-4-sprint/general/start-list-note-4-sprint-samsung-bloat-t2914439
http://www.downloads.galaxyunlocker.com/List-of-bloatware-apps-safe-to-remove-Samsung-Galaxy-S3-S2-GalaxyUnlocker.com.pdf
Google Plus Messenger Icon is a red icon with a white text box and a white plus sign in it. I cannot find out how to delete it from my phone.
Google Plus Messenger red icon with white caption and a white plus sign. What is this app?
I have this Google Plus Messenger icon on Little Weed’s smartphone. I’d like to remove this .apk from the screen but I cannot seem to find the .apk’s name. I think it is Google+ but I don’t want to delete all of Google+. There seems to be no .apk specifically for this icon. XDA-Developers has a short thread on it but not so helpful that says to simply hide it.
While it is useful to understand what is on your phone, this takes a lot of study to go through how to do this. Not only do you need to root, put on a recovery program on your phone and make a nandroid backup, but you also need to research each app before you rename it. Rename the wrong app and your phone might go wonky. It would be better to buy a phone that does not come with such bloatware. Not everyone has the technical chops to remove all these apps.
I wonder if the cost of the smartphone is subsidized by adding bloatware to the phone. This is very similar to ads on a web page, or adware installed when you install some other program. Most consumers cannot remove this stuff. Because of bloatware over the course of a year or two the phone slows down such that the owner feels they need to buy another. Is this the overall plan? Is this part of the planned obsolescence for phones? Or is it the carrier that adds this in order to reduce the cost of the phone?
Even though this is a Google product it is surprising that there are only 2 images on Google, though it has probably been shipped to millions of people through their smartphones.
