Help Technical question on bloatware for gurus

[Snakeyeskm]

Hopefully, some of our technical gurus can help clarify my understanding of bloatware and its impact on storage/memory. (Calling EarlyMon, ironass, AZ).
As I understand it, bloatware installed by both Samsung and the carrier resides in a separate system partition in the phone storage. As such, when bloatware is disabled the user gets no additional storage capacity since the system partition is not accessible to unrooted phones. Disabling however, theoretically, reduces the amount of RAM utilized since the disabled bloatware no longer loads. However, given the efficient use and management of RAM by android, it is highly unlikely that this reduction will have any impact on performance. The bottom line being, disabling bloatware does little to nothing to help performance and storage capacity.
Assuming, I am summarizing correctly (unlikely, I know) there is one area where disabling bloatware can help a little.
Here lies my question.
Bloatware is also subject to updates, are these updates stored in the system partition? I doubt it, since it would be difficult for Samsung and the carrier to anticipate long-term storage requirements for their system partition. Therefore I am assuming that updates to bloatware would be stored in the "data/app" partition. If that is the case, uninstalling the updates to bloatware and disabling auto update in Google play store for that particular bloatware, will actually help in increasing/saving storage space?

 

[EarlyMon]

Pre-installed apps of any kind are stored in /system/app (sometimes some in /system/priv-app) - user-installed apps and updates to pre-installed apps are stored in /data/app. All private data for all apps is stored elsewhere in /data.

Disabling Play Store updates for bloatware is therefore an excellent idea. Going into your apps manager and disabling it if you can is even better.

Most storage reporting tools either over-complicate or over-simplify what's going on, are focused on the internal storage (aka the internal sd card) and are unnecessarily confusing.

@scary alien and I put together a simple but very powerful tool for exactly your question.

Check out "Storage Truth"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sa.storagetruth

If you would like to know more about that as well as our recommendations for tools you can trust on this subject, please see -

http://androidforums.com/threads/qu...e-is-your-storage-truth-read-me-first.906249/

Storage Truth is going to reveal to you that your new Samsung does have a fair amount of free space set aside in /system for future expansion of the operating system - but bloatware updates are not written there (unless as part of an operating system OTA update) - because writing to /system is a privileged process.

Unwanted bloatware comes in two forms - benign and malignant.

Benign bloatware just sits there and does nothing. If you never launch it, it does nothing. You don't bother it and it won't bother you.

Unfortunately the majority of bloatware is malignant, constantly running and consuming resources. And because they're system apps they have privileges that regular apps don't. There are no quality standards because they don't need them - they don't have to compete on the open market.

Years back I had a phone with an all-day battery with normal use - after I rooted and removed bloatware. One bloatware app alone and in particular misbehaved very badly for only a few of us on that phone - and on mine, was able to single-handedly kill my battery in less than 3 hours, screen off and doing nothing. Automatic task killing only made it worse.

On that note -

http://androidforums.com/threads/pu...k-killers-ram-optimizers-and-the-like.896663/

Your new Samsung has a display for RAM and a task cleaner built-in, I understand that it looks like this -



And although I expect to draw fire from the Samsung faithful, I'm going to warn you right now - KEEP YOUR FINGERS OFF OF THE CLEAN ALL BUTTON.

Samsung announced a new deal this year - it's included components from Clean Master in that tool.

If you look at the task killer and RAM cleaners thread I linked above, you'll find that Clean Master may be the largest selling Android app today. It got that way in part with a malware campaign (yes, you heard me and proof is linked above) and in part because of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about how Android works. It actually lies about what it does.

I consider all apps like Clean Master malignant, I prove it in the above link, and I provide complete instructions so you can see the evidence for yourself.

If you want to understand the truth about what your RAM is doing and where it's at at any given point in time, @scary alien and I put together another simple tool because no one else did.

Check out "RAM Truth"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sa.ramtruth

If you want to learn more about running processes and apps below what we show you, there are a number of excellent apps for that - and a bigger number of nonsense apps - so here's a recommendation for an excellent one (free listed here, go pro if you like it to unlock more features).

Check out "SystemPanelLite Task Manager"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nextapp.systempanel

But for reasons explained in the above link, don't become reliant on it to kill bloatware.

If you become the victim of malignant bloatware that you can not disable, root and remove it.

I hope that this answers your questions and because these are important topics, I'm going to pin this thread to the sticky section for a while so others will notice it and ask questions, join in the discussion as needed.

 

[EarlyMon]

You're welcome.

Not a shameless plug, just a fact - if you tap on each row in RAM Truth, it will tell what each part is and where you don't have to care about your battery.

 

[ironass]

I concur with EarlyMon 100%. The hybrid carrier firmwares for AT&T and Verizon, particularly, carry a lot, 20+, of baked in apps which are the price you pay for a subsidised handset. Unfortunately, most of these are malignant and serve to slow your phone down and drain your battery. As EarlyMon points out, as they are firmware apps, added by your carrier, there is no quality control on them and they can do as they please irrespective of the consequences to your performance and battery. So, in short...

1. They will not save you space by un-installing them as that space has already been reserved.

2. You will need to root and freeze those apps with Titanium Backup Pro from the Play Store to stop the little blighters.

 

[EarlyMon]

Always uninstall updates before freezing.