Ancestors

Written by Adrianna Pińska on 2024-11-27 at 22:51

I have an old Xiaomi phone that I've been using as a media player (mostly for podcasts). It's been getting increasingly glitchy, and recently started complaining about running out of space. There seemed to be no way within the walled garden to find and clear the mysterious > 10G of "other files" eating the internal storage. So I finally figured out how to connect it to my desktop with adb. Works on Linux; no rooting required.

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Toot

Written by Adrianna Pińska on 2024-11-27 at 22:55

You can install the basic adb (Android Debug Bridge) commandline UI from the normal Ubuntu repo (it's probably very old but it worked fine), and there's a friendly GUI app for uninstalling some common bloatware that you can get here: https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater You also have to enable developer options and then USB debugging in your phone settings; this varies between phones. My phone didn't initially show up as connected (even in lsusb), but I think it was a dodgy cable.

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Descendants

Written by Adrianna Pińska on 2024-11-27 at 22:59

• Anyway*, these aren't exhaustive instructions, because I'm not an expert and you shouldn't listen to me. The TL;DR is that while using adb without root can't really uninstall the bloaty apps (it just moves them), this did solve my problem, because disabling them and rebooting apparently cleared a metric fuckton of cached app data (the vast majority of that mystery category).

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Written by Adrianna Pińska on 2024-11-27 at 23:03

I didn't have a lot to lose here (it's not my primary phone; I could have done a factory reset), but I was careful to follow recommendations from multiple safe lists (the GUI app has some built in, and there are various forum posts floating around -- some innocuous-looking apps should not be touched; this also varies between phones). I also wasn't that aggressive, although I removed all the (safe) MIUI cloud backup stuff which I will never use.

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Written by Adrianna Pińska on 2024-11-27 at 23:07

My new (also Xiaomi) phone is fine for now (also, possibly as a result of negative feedback, you can remove a lot more of the default apps in the newer versions of the OS). But it's nice to have this option for later, just in case.

If you have an old bloaty Android phone, this is only medium-scary (as opposed to the full rooting / unlocking options). Apparently there's no way to truly brick the phone like this, but you can get it into a state that requires a factory reset, so maybe do a backup.

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