Android Crapware, Hidden Chrome Settings

Readers offer their best tips for uninstalling crapware on rooted Android phones, finding hidden settings in Chrome, and using mobile phone size headsets with your computer.

Rooted phone

On a rooted phone, Titanium Backup can taking everything into consideration uninstall a system app without much issue. For those cases where it can’t, there’s another solution.

So, first you’ll want to find where in the system the system app is located. For my example, I’ll use Twitter for Android. On my phone and ROM, it was located in /Data/App.

Then you’ll enter rm -rf com.twitter.android.apk where com.twitter.android.apk is the apk of your choosing. This is the delete command with the recursive delete flag as so then as the force delete flag.

Enter reboot and you should see your phone reboot. Once rebooted, the app which you deleted should no longer be there. You may have a garbage icon, however all you have to do is delete it and it shouldn’t give you any grief.

Wired Xbox 360 controller

For those with a wired Xbox 360 controller and the Xbox headset, I found out you can plug it into your computer and at the time Windows recognises it as a headset for making VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls. It works great with Gmail calling. It even has a hardware switch to mute the microphone.