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Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA

(smex.org)
845 points the-anarchist | 1 comments | 21 Jun 25 03:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.234s | source
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grishka ◴[21 Jun 25 03:52 UTC] No.44334337[source]▶
The "unremovable" part is inaccurate. While you can't completely remove it because it resides on the system partition, you most probably can still disable it with an adb command:

    adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.package.name
This command is very powerful as it works for any app, even those that have "disable" greyed out in the settings. I disabled the Galaxy Store on my S9 this way for example.
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npteljes ◴[21 Jun 25 10:18 UTC] No.44336280[source]▶
Words don't just have a literal, technical meaning. If the phone itself doesn't allow a straightforward, user friendly happy-path for removal, it might as well be "unremovable" in a sense that it is indeed unremovable for most users. "adb shell etc" implies that one has a PC with this tool correctly installed, and many people don't even have a PC in the first place. Then comes the case of installing adb, setting it up correctly, and having a cable to connect the two, enabling debug mode, and doing the thing. This is much more like a service thing, than a do it yourself at home thing. Not much unlike "chip tuning" for cars.
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1. grishka ◴[21 Jun 25 10:36 UTC] No.44336369[source]▶
This doesn't strictly require a PC. There's this trick with using the wireless debugging feature to connect the phone to itself. You can do it with a terminal app like Termux but Shizuku is a nice GUI that streamlines this process and exposes an API for other apps to use. After a quick web search I found https://github.com/samolego/Canta which is, again, a GUI app that uses Shizuku to uninstall apps via adb.

I agree that it's not easy, but anyone sufficiently annoyed by these non-otherwise-removable apps who is able to follow instructions should be able to get it done without needing a computer or special knowledge or messing with the command line.