Uninstall any preinstalled system app from Android cell phone

New smartphones tend to be stuffed with useless and sometime annoying applications. Unlike the apps installed by phone owners, some preinstalled apps cannot be uninstalled by tapping the buttons on the phone screen.

With the help of a computer any system app can be uninstalled from a mobile phone. The procedure is not complicated, but is longer than tapping a button. To illustrate the procedure, I demonstrate how to remove YouTube and Facebook, two widespread apps that are often classified as system.

The first step is the most complicated. You have to enable and then find the Developer options menu in your phone. A general procedure is described in the Android documentation https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options. However, the exact way depends on the phone model. Search in Google how to enable Developer options in your phone model if you want to do it quickly.

Activate the USB debugging option in the Developer Options menu.

Connect the phone to the computer using a standard cable that you use for transfering photos or videos from your phone to your computer.

Download SDK Platform Tools zip archive from https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools to your computer and extract its contents any folder of your choice (for example C:\TEMP). The archive includes Android Debug Bridge (adb), a command-line tool for sending commands to a phone from a computer. The three adb commands…