RedMi Note 11. Just received it for Christmas and boy was I crying the first time I booted it. 1 Gb of bloatware must most importantly: impossible to uninstall chrome.
That is ok if any other browser can co-exist beside it… Boy was I wrong again. Some links from apps don’t even care about my default browser, they just open chrome cause hell yeah.
This is sickening me, Google is beginning to really disgust me. Someday I’ll root this mf to get rid of ALL the bloatware
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You’re not my mom!
(Seriously though, when I get a new phone I basically search for “google” in Universal Android Debloater and uninstall everything that pops up and isn’t in the “unsafe” category.)
You can safely uninstall Chrome over adb shell. There’s a specific webview package that takes care of webview (
com.google.android.webview), not Chrome.deleted by creator
If you’re running a custom ROM then it’s possible that the WebView implementation is a custom one (i.e. not updateable by Google, but updated by the ROM makers instead, like Vanadium on GrapheneOS), but I’m pretty sure Google linked their Chrome runtime pretty tightly against their Android WebView implementation to save storage (previously you basically had to full copies of Chrome on your device, now Chrome and the WebView API share the same library that gets updated alongside Chrome).
That said, the TriChrome library is pretty much hidden from the UI, so you may not notice that Chrome is actually still installed in the background. The Chrome “app” is basically a UI library in top of the Google Chrome code that’s packaged as a system library, but if you were to remove everything that comes with “Chrome” you now break the WebView as well.
This is something that changed as of Android Q so earlier versions may still have the separation, but if you can update the WebView from the Play Store, there’s an almost complete version of Chrome hiding in your system these days.
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Yeah, Graphene does a really good job at making their ROM as Google-less as possible. It’s a real shame there are no widely supported forks for other devices, because LineageOS seems to be falling behind when it comes to replacing the Google parts with alternatives.
Weird side effect: if you install Google Chrome on your device through the Play Store, it’ll download a second copy of TriChrome that you later will have to delete manually if you uninstall Chrome. You probably don’t need or want to install Chrome, but it’s just one of those Google Android Things.