Bloat Manager

I recently bought a Droid 2 Global and decided to get my feet wet with android development. To familiarize myself with the platform I wrote a simple utility for managing the bloat that came pre-installed on my phone. I thought there might be other people who would get some use out of this so I am posting it here. You will need to be rooted and have busybox installed to use this application. If you used z4root to root your phone then you should have everything you need.

The application is pretty simple. When you start it you are presented with a list of the Bloat that the application recognizes. Each item in the list has a checkbox that indicates whether it is enabled or not. To disable bloat you just uncheck the boxes next to what you don't want and then press the Apply button that appears at the bottom of the screen. You can save what you have disabled as a profile by pressing the options button and then choosing Save Profile. This is convenient because you are going to need to turn all of this bloat back on if you want to receive updates. If you have saved a profile and a new update becomes available you can launch Bloat Manager, press the options button, choose Enable All and then click Apply to get your phone ready for the update. After the update installs you can launch Bloat Manager, press the options button, choose Load Profile and then click Apply to turn the bloat back off.

The following applications can be toggled on or off using Bloat Manager:

Amazon MP3 /system/app/amazonmp3_1_8_14_signed_zipaligned_Signed_2010-09-09_15-23-51.apk
Blockbuster /system/app/Blockbuster.apk
City ID /system/app/CityID.apk
Friend Feed /system/app/FriendFeed.apk
Kindle /system/app/Kindle-1_0_2-OEM-SingleSign_Signed_2010-09-20_17-31-57.apk
My Net /system/app/Mynet.apk
My Verizon /system/app/MyVerizon.apk
News Widget /system/app/NewsWidget.apk
Performance Manager /system/app/PerformanceManager.apk
Skype /system/app/Skype_mobile.live.apk
Social Messaging /system/app/SocialMessaging.apk
Social Share /system/app/SocialShare.apk
VZNavigator /system/app/vnav_6.1.0.160_Droid2Global_rel_PROD_signed.apk
Visual Voice Mail /system/app/Vvm.apk
Weather Widget /system/app/WeatherWidget.apk
World Clock Widget /system/app/WorldClockWidget.apk

When you disable an application using Bloat Manager it simply renames it to .bak. When you re-enable an application it is renamed back to .apk.

Bloat Manager remounts your /system partition as writable in order to make changes to applications. I came up with this list based on what other people have had success with removing, but I have not personally turned off everything on the list. Changing things in your system partition is always dangerous so please be careful.

Correct, this simply renames the apps so that they are no longer recognized as launchable applications. The applications will not be able to run anymore after they are renamed so they will not affect your battery life directly. I have heard that the operating system will continually try and restart some apps if they get renamed, but based on what people are saying in the bloatware removal script thread on droidforums where I got this list of applications none of these should have that problem.

Let me know how it goes.

Are there any specific applications you would like to see added? I designed it so that the list can be extended but I haven't implemented an easy way to add things yet. If you know your way around a SQLite database you can add new items to the Bloat table to put them in the list. I plan on adding an import feature that lets you add a group of applications from a file in the near future.

I plan on making the next version a lot more flexible in terms of which phones it will be useful for. If you guys can get me a list of which apps can safely be removed from your phones I can add them to the next version.

Technically this version should run on other phones so long as they are rooted and have busybox installed in /system/bin. If your phone has some of the same bloat that comes on a Droid 2 Global you may be able to use this to remove it. Any applications that the program cannot find when it starts will have a ! on the front of their names in the list. Bloat Manager won't be able to turn those off.