It’s true: you can remove a crap ton of bloatware from the Samsung Galaxy S6
Ahead of its launch, some Samsung Galaxy S6 rumors claimed that Samsung was going with a more “Nexus-like” user experience as opposed to the bloated TouchWiz mess of the past. That wasn’t totally true — it’s still TouchWiz with all of Samsung’s typical goodies sprinkled throughout.
But perhaps the rumors were speaking more about pre-installed apps and giving users more control over how much is loaded onto their device. XDA user Jeshter2000 was lucky enough to grab hold of a Samsung Galaxy S6 before its official launch and held an AMA session. One of the biggest requests was information about pre-installed apps.
The verdict? They can be removed, or at the very least disabled and never to be heard from again. Holding down on the icon of a number of apps will bring up a minus symbol that, when pressed, will either uninstall or disable the app.
If you’re not aware of what it means to disable an app, it simply removes the app from your app drawer and makes it so that the system can’t launch the app. The app still takes up space, though it’s usually a negligible amount.
Many of the apps that you can uninstall can be redownloaded from Samsung’s app store or Google Play, so if you find yourself wanting to bring some of it back then it shouldn’t be a pain to make that happen.
And yes, this goes for the huge folder of Google’s apps you’ll find pre-installed on the device as well. It’s not perfect, but least we know we won’t have to root from day one to remove most of the gunk from the Samsung Galaxy S6 once we power it up for the first time on April 10th.