Phone manufacturers often put additional bloatware and other apps on their phones before shipping them out to customers. While most of these apps are nothing but glorified advertisements, some of them can be useful.
In this article, we’re talking about the Mobile Installer app found on Samsung phones, what it does and whether or not it’s safe to keep on your device.
Also read: What is com.sec.unifiedwfc?
Mobile Installer: explained
As mentioned before, Mobile Installer is a pre-installed app found mostly on Samsung devices, specifically Samsung devices coming through Sprint. The app’s primary function is to install other bloatware or carrier apps in the background.
The app can be especially troublesome as it doesn’t ask the user’s permission before installing other apps, meaning your phone can be filled with bloatware without noticing. More often than not, the only indication you’ll get that Mobile Installer is installing any other app is a “Processing Request” notification that you can’t dismiss.
While the app doesn’t necessarily comprise any system apps and does do things in a shady manner, it isn’t exactly harmful. Aside from installing additional bloatware on your phone, the app doesn’t do much.
Also read: How to prevent apps from accessing sensitive data from clipboard using ADB?
Can you uninstall Mobile Installer?
One of the worst things about the app is that you can’t uninstall it as you would with an app downloaded from the Google Play Store or disable it as you would with a system app. Additionally, there’s a high chance that the app might reappear every time your carrier pushes out an update.
To uninstall the app and some of the bloatware with it, you will have to use ADB or software like NoBloat to root your phone and get rid of the app. Since ADB doesn’t require rooting your phone, we recommend you use it to remove the app if you want.
Uninstalling using ADB
Once you’ve downloaded and set up ADB on your computer, you will have to enable USB debugging on your phone. Once these two requirements are met, you can open a terminal with the ADB daemon and type the following command to get a list of all installed packages on your phone.
pm list packages | grep ‘(OEM or Carrier name)’Once you’ve located the package name of the Mobile Installer app, use the following command to remove the app from your phone.
pm uninstall –k —user 0 (name of the package)Also read: How to take an encrypted backup of your Android device using ADB?
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