My phone installed 6 apps on its own

vraylle, 10 months ago

Assuming Android? Had a similar issue with different apps. Turned out to be something called "Mobile Services" doing this. Some ads also used it to sideload apps. Found an article about this class of software and it's apparently common on phones. Key was to look at the package names (I used the Package Names app). In my case, com.dti.tracfone. disabled THAT app and no more problem.

Reference: http://telstramobileloop.com/what-is-mobile-services-manager/

Sharpiemarker, 10 months ago

Just a side note that Kaspersky hasn’t been reliable since the early 00’s.

6mementomori, 10 months ago

seems like in my case it was called carrier services

TimeMuncher2, 10 months ago

Yup, if your phone region is set to India, Redmi phones start installing lot of useless apps. I used some universal Android debloater on GitHub to remove all the spyware apps. Even disabled miui update, since it is the main reason these apps are installed.

Letranger, 10 months ago

Dude, redmi itself is a huge spyware device. And you are worried about Amazon and Netflix ?

glorious_albus, 10 months ago

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.

GamerBoy705, 10 months ago

Even a PC isn’t strictly necessary. You can do the same right on that phone, but it takes more effort

glorious_albus, 10 months ago

Fair enough.

Wooly, 10 months ago

I was able to uninstall all those preinstalled apps with my Redmi note 10, maybe something changed with the newer models.

6mementomori, 10 months ago

I uninstalled them, the problem is that they installed themselves

Wreckronomicon, 10 months ago

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:

ihax.io/freeze-and-uninstall-system-apps-on-andro…

6mementomori, 10 months ago

I uninstalled them, the problem is that they installed themselves

z3n0x, 10 months ago

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.

6mementomori, 10 months ago

that’s… exactly what I did. I changed my location to Italy…

z3n0x, 10 months ago

interesting!

Elephant0991, 10 months ago

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.

Cow_says_moo, 10 months ago

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.

6mementomori, 10 months ago

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…

finallyawake, 10 months ago

Xiaomi.eu is what you’re looking for. Miui without the problem areas.

ilikecoffee, 10 months ago

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.

nottheengineer, 10 months ago

Xiaomi’s ROM is held together by spit and hope, screwing around in it with root access is basically guaranteed to break it sooner or later.