Re:Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete F...
by GuB-42 on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @12:59PM
(#18866976)
AFAIK, disable apps don't use up any useful memory at all.
These apps sit in the system partition, which is read-only. If you root your phone, you can remount it read-write and remove them. However by doing so, integrity checks will fail. Also you won't be able to use that memory unless you repartition or put other apps there anyways.
The bad news is that if you update pre-installed apps, the original version will stay in the system partition doing nothing while you use the version you downloaded in the data partition.
It was a really big problem with early Android devices like the Nexus One (512 MB of storage).
How are you defining "small"‽
I have Excel installed myself and it shows as 438MB. Word is smaller at 265MB, OneDrive is surprisingly chunky compared to that at 110MB.
I've not got PowerPoint installed and Play store doesn't seem to currently display space requirements of non-installed apps (which I'm sure it previously did).
That might be small on your 128Mb+ device (IIRC the Note 9 doesn't come in smaller variants) but if they are getting pre-installed on 64 or 32Mb devices too, that is more than enough to be a significant issue for users who don't particularly have use for them at all but who do want to use their storage for music/photos/video/... instead of unused apps.