Even though Onyx’s Android devices are actually free of bloatware, there might be some apps you don’t need or should not use and that cannot be uninstalled by using the application settings of your device. But you can still do it (without root!) by using ADB from the Android Platform Tools.
This article is based on an Onyx Boox Note 2, but it is also applicable to any other Android device.
Install Android Platform Tools
You can download and install it from here. If you’re a mac user, you can also use Homebrew to install the Cask “android-platform-tools”. On Windows you may need to add the ADB executable manually to your environment variables.
Prepare your Boox
Before you can run ADB commands on your Android device you must enable the “USB Debugging Mode” in the settings. To do this on your Boox, just open settings, click on Applications and tick the “USB Debugging Mode” checkbox. That’s it.
You can now connect your Boox tablet with your computer using a USB cable. If USB debugging is enabled you will see a dialog on your tablet that asks to grant access to your computer.
If granted, on Android 9 a “P” will appear in the notifications bar. Sometimes it is necessary to reconnect your device to the computer or to lock and unlock or in rare cases to restart it.
Retrieve app package names
Without the package name of an application you can’t uninstall it. The easiest way to get the package names of your installed application is to use an app like “Package Name Viewer 2.0”. This app is free and looks like this on your Boox:
Uninstall and reinstall applications
Before we start, you don’t need to worry about harming your device. You can only uninstall system applications for the current user (this is the meaning of — user 0 in the commands later) and reinstall them at any time.
To uninstall an application (for example Android Keyboard (AOSP) with the package name “com.onyx.latinime”), you need to run this command on your terminal:
To re-install this application simply execute:
Applications that I removed
I uninstalled apps like Clock (has nothing to do with system clock), Calculator, the super outdated Browser, the Onyx App Store, both Keyboards (I use GBoard), E-Mail, Music, Navigation-Ball, Sound Recorder, SIM Toolkit and Android Easter Egg.
