Your Android or Windows phone can turn out to be the most productive gadgets, when you’re away from your PCs, laptops and notebooks. These portable devices often serve you as an excellent travelling companion, a personal business assistant, or a complete entertainment device, but have you ever felt that some unnecessary apps on your device are making it slow? Do you think that uninstalling these apps is the only solution to set back your gadget to perform with normal speed and pace? If yes, then first of all you need to analyze that which apps are occupying more space than others, and how they are affecting the performance and functioning of your device.
All of the portable gadgets come preloaded with dozens of powerful apps that are specially developed to make your working experience go smoother and faster. Unfortunately, developers or manufacturers may pre-install some heavy application, programs, and software that you don’t need or want. These pre-installed apps are often called ‘Bloatware apps’ and are easy to remove, if a user wish to do so. Removing these apps won’t affect the functioning of your device rather it will make them run at a better speed with improved overall performance.
Read this blog to get to know about 5 worst Bloatware apps that your manufacturers have dumped into your Smartphone and discover useful steps to remove the same.
1. Caller ID Services
Spending on such apps would be wastage of money and resources, as some free caller ID apps such as Current Caller ID are readily available for Android at the Google Play store.
2. Paid Maps Apps
Leading IT giants such as Google, Bing, Microsoft, and others have offered you some of the best solutions for navigation and mapping your surroundings. These apps are available free and have been offering powerful map services for years. All your latest Smartphone carriers might not like the idea of offering everything for free, hence, they have incorporated a paid map app that will now navigate you through the corners of the city.
AT&T and Verizon, two most prominent mobile phone sellers, have preload their own $9.99 per month maps app that delivers branded navigation services with its AT&T Navigator and VZ Navigator, respectively. They have pre-installed it on most of the phones they sell and other companies are also following the same trend to fetch some dollars from a user’s wallet. Lined up next is Sprint with its Scout GPS Navigation and Traffic app that offer some features for free, but make constant attempts to upsell you for a $4.99 monthly subscription.
These apps will perform the basic functions that any other maps app can do, hence, wasting money on it should be discouraged.
3. Ringtone Stores
Attention seeking ringtones have always been a preferred choice of youngsters and has always topped the most download apps charts every year. Getting a funny, funky, romantic, instrumental, vocal, and wicked ringtones is a fun experience for many. To cater this requirement, most of the mobile carriers have preloaded their own music / ringtone stores in the devices from where you can buy sounds for $1.99 or more.
If you are looking for the latest ringtone over the web, then downloading it and transferring it to your Smartphone can help you save lot of dollars. Or you can also download some of the free ringtone apps that are available on your Android, iTunes, and other prominent apps database.
4. TV series
Mobile manufacturers have a bigger plan for all those TV series fans, who have just missed an important episode of their favorite show while being a weekend gateway. Hulu, Netflix, Areo, Comcast Xfinity, and many other prominent on-demand Internet streaming media providers have got a tough competition as the manufacturers are now heading towards incorporating their own on-demand or as a live streaming service. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are the top three players, which offer $9.99 monthly rental services that offer streaming access to a few basic cable channels and shows on-demand.
Opting for these services would be as good as choosing a subscription plan from already available on-demand Internet streaming media providers.
5. Carrier Backup and Cloud Storage
Data security and privacy is something that no one wants to compromise with. Various major players such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive offer free cloud storage services. Storing the data on such platforms make you feel safe and protected when it comes to dealing with important yet crucial information, documents, scanned files, and others. Joining the race to offer a safe environment for all of your data, AT&T Locker and Verizon Cloud have provided a 5GB of free storage service on all their mobiles.
Choosing the manufacturer’s platform can be a losing proposition for many users as they may offer a limited amount of storage space, while Google and Microsoft both offer more free space 15GB and 7GB, respectively.
How to remove the Bloatware apps from your device?
Since, you might have started feeling that these apps are useless and all they do is occupy extra space on your hard disk drive. Therefore, removing them would be a better option as it will not only enhance the performance of the device, but will also free-up some extra space on your hard drive for other important downloads and installs.
To remove these apps from your mobile phones, follow these steps:
Steps to remove Bloatware on any Android phone
Step1. Start up your device and navigate to ‘Settings.’
Step2. Select the ‘Application Manager’ (or Applications on some devices) and scroll over the list of all the apps installed on your device.
Step3. Tap an app you wish to remove and then tap on the ‘Turn Off,’ ‘Disable’ or ‘Uninstall’ button to remove.
Steps to remove Bloatware on any Windows phone
Step1. Open your phone and navigate to the ‘All apps’ menu. You can also get there by tapping on the right arrow, located at the bottom of your Home screen.
Step2. Carefully look at the list of apps available and long press on an app that you want to remove.
Step3. Select ‘Uninstall’ button, when the phone asks for a response.
Bloatware apps are counted amongst one of the top-most issues that might make a user feel annoyed and frustrated. Constant pop-ups, instant payment reminders, slowdowns, and irritating messages stating that the content is updated on the app may distract users from using the apps section. It doesn’t only slow down your Smartphone, but will also take up valuable internal storage space that can be used for other important downloads and installs.
For all of these reasons, users are always searching the web to find out the latest ways to remove bloatware. Apart from following the above mentioned steps, bloatware can also be removed by rooting your device and then you can easily uninstall any apps you don’t like. Although, the above mentioned steps will make them go disappear from your device, but rooting can be really dangerous as it voids the warranty of the device.
