Android Project How-To: Manually Remove Pre-Loaded Apps

In the beginning of the Android invasion the carriers shipped their first phones without a lot of bloat/crapware mainly due to the small user base at the time. Now that Android is gaining an approximate 200,000 new followers a day, there is serious incentive for the carriers to load apps like Nascar, AmazonMP3, and a host of other apps that may very well be useless to the user. Even worse, is they bake these apps into the OS so standard un-installation is not possible. But, thanks to the Android Community out there, it is possible to Root nearly any device on the market and gain privileges you should have had in the first place--like being able to remove those apps that are of no interest to you and that are possibly using some behind the scenes CPU.

In this post I will show you how to remove these apps for free using a few simple lines of code via the Terminal Emulator. For the record I am on a Nexus One (AT&T version) running CM6 so naturally I didn't have much pre-loaded; AmazonMP3 was the only one. For the newer phones on other carriers there are likely more apps you may want removed.

Here are the steps:

1. Get Rooted. If you are not, then this post is not for you. If you want to be, try Google.

2. Download SuperUser from the market.

3. Download Teminal Emulator from the market.

4. Ensure SuperUser rights for Terminal Emulator in the SuperUser app.

5. Open Terminal Emulator.

6. You should see a # sign. If you don't type "su" and hit return.

7. You will need to remount your system folder on the phone with write permissions. To do this type "mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mtdblock3  /system" hit return.

(it won't say anything it will just go back to a # sign again).

8. Now type "cd  /system/app" hit return and then "ls"

You will now see a of all the apk files, which are the applications. For the most part the crapware apps aren't tied together or connected to the Android System. I wanted to remove AmazonMP3, which is pretty much a standalone.

9. Type "rm -r xxxxx.apk" (it's case sensitive) hit return.

example: rm -r com.amazon.mp3.apk

And as you can see my phone no longer has AmazonMP3 in its app drawer.

There are a number of steps, but trust me it is fairly simple and easy. After I did these, I restarted my App Launcher and found the AmazonMP3 app gone. It is also not self starting and running in the background.

As usual, there are risks with these types of activities, so please do a backup beforehand.

There are a number of apps that require Root that do great back-ups found in the market, like Titanium, MyBackUp Pro, etc.

Good luck!