For the ones that allow you to, yeah. But how would you e.g. easily disable/delete Google Play Services (say, if you didn't want Google on your phone)? The disable option is disabled.

Also, even when I try disabling some of these built-in Google apps that I supposedly can disable, I get a prompt warning me that "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave"... you can't keep a straight face telling a user "oh but you can easily disable this!" when you yourself are telling them the consequence is that it might break other things on their phone. (!)

They just mean apps that use Google play services will be broken. I don't think that's unreasonable. it seems you want it both ways, you want the ability to remove or disable Google play services, without losing access to them.

A lot of built in apps do not offer services to other apps, but they still display the same message. Google Play Services is the exceptional case.

Some of them simply reactivate/redownload themselves every time you do this.

You basically have to root the phone to remove a lot of the Google/vendor bloatware.

yes, but you cannot delete the google apps such as chrome or gmail (the option is not "enabled")

You can disable both. (I have Chrome disabled, because I like Firefox more).

Thankfully those are most often bundled as stubs that take barely any space. roll back the updates and then disable. Did that to Chrome for the longest time as i was using Firefox on my Android device (before Mozilla went nuts. Now i am flipflopping between Opera and Brave, while waiting for Vivaldi to get a mobile version).

Keep in mind that (a) if the fact that you have to roll back updates is not obvious to people here, I'm not sure how a normal user is supposed to find it "easy", and (b) if you have to roll it back too, you'd lose your data in that app, so it's neither as consequence-free as disabling, nor as thorough as deleting (freeing all the space etc.).

Simply hitting "disable" warns you that it will uninstall updates & delete user data.

It's literally a single button press to get back 100% of the space possible, and it's the button called "disable" right in front at the top of the app's info section.

It's infuriatingly confusing and it's not clear that you will get back 100% of the space. If they are sincere about this, why cannot you simply fucking uninstall the damn application ? No stub, no nothing. Just a normal app like the others, that you can install or not.

Because it's on the system partition which is fixed size and read-only. That's how factory reset works, by nuking the data partition.

They probably should just lie and rename the button to uninstall. That's basically what it is.

Yes, you can. Both gmail & chrome have working disable buttons. At least they do on a Pixel 2.

Disable is not delete.

Yes, it is. It no longer exists on the data partition nor can it run any code or be loaded. It has no size impact to you.

The only difference is a factory reset will restore it.

"Yes, it is"

No, it isn't. That's why they call it "disable" and not "delete".

Ok so they just need to rename the button and you're happy. Got it.

Some apps can't be disabled. The t-mobile application for instance.