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My phone installed 6 apps on its own (self.techsupport)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by 6mementomori to c/techsupport

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I found Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify on my home, yet I never even visited their websites on this phone. I never recently installed or visited sus places, I ran a full scan with Kaspersky, found nothing. I disabled "MetaAppInstall" from the settings. I have a Redmi Note 12 Pro. I did some googling and it says for Facebook that it's because of sponsorship. Is this it? You literally can't escape from those apps even by never looking at them because your phone will force them on you? Or is there some other reason? Edit: I can uninstall them, and I did. It's just that they installed themselves and I don't want them to do it again

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you can't just uninstall them then disable them in the settings but occasionally they do come back if there are major updates to them and your Google Play is set to auto-update all apps, I've never had that since disabling the apps I don't want though.

Rooting your phone might not be a good idea as it can disable things like banking apps, secure folders and such, there are supposedly ways to hide your root but I never got them to work on my banking app and unrooting won't fix that if you have a digital fuse on your phone (samsung has these and once they're tripped they can't be un-tripped).

I think you can use ADB without rooting to uninstall apps that can't be done via the UI but you'll need a seperate computer to do this. Have a look at this link but, as always, do some research on the subject rather than taking a strangers word:

https://ihax.io/freeze-and-uninstall-system-apps-on-android-without-root/#:~:text=To%20uninstall%20any%20system%20app%20from%20your%20Android,an%20app%20but%20will%20keep%20the%20app%20data.%29

[–] 6mementomori 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I uninstalled them, the problem is that they installed themselves

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I found that changing the region of these devices can significantly change which apps gets installed.

Once I set a Xiaomi phone to "Italy" and it immediately started installing all the usual suspect apps Xiaomi had sponsorship deals with. Then just for fun I switched to "Israel" and almost all of them disappeared, apparently due to some local consumer protection laws or lack of sponsorship for this region, idk

In other words: these sponsorship deals seem to be highly localized.

[–] 6mementomori 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that's... exactly what I did. I changed my location to Italy.....

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

interesting!