Introduction

Recently, I bought a brand new Sony Xperia mainly because of its 24-bit DAC so I could listen to my HiRes FLAC files. It was the cheapest non-chinese vendor with dual SIM support that supports HiRes audio (wired/wireless).

Not a novel solution but more elegant!

The problem started as I noted that my phone has Netflix and Facebook pre-installed but there is no way to remove them using the standard Android GUI. A quick search led me to this post by xda developers which solved my problem. In short the solution is fairly straightforward:

1. Install ADB and enable USB debugging
2. Connect to your device through ADB shell
3. Search for package names that you want to remove
4. Use pm uninstall to remove packages one by one

I thought to myself “well if we are using a simple shell, we could put the last two steps together and get rid of copy/pasting”. So this is the result:

pm list packages | grep facebook | sed 's/package://' | xargs -n 1 pm uninstall --user 0

• pm stands for package manager and is used here to list all installed packages and consequently uninstall bloatware.
• grep is used to filter only desired packages (here facebook).
• sed is to cleanup results. pm list prints package: string as prefix for each package name.
• xargs takes the results from previous commands and apply them as arguments to the given command (here pm uninstall --user 0). Note the usage of -n 1 that tells xargs to execute pm uninstall for each line of result not once for all results.

One last note: later, I found out that someone had already proposed a similar solution but using td instead of sed.