Internet experts at Kaspersky warned of the dangers of leaving “hidden” applications on Android phones, and revealed how to remove them permanently to avoid their harm.
According to the report, most Android phone owners have 80 installed applications, and 30% of them “are never used.”
Internet experts say this can cause many problems, including consuming storage space and possibly quietly "spying" on you.
“There is less free space on the device, potential errors and compatibility issues multiply, and even unused apps sometimes distract you with pointless alerts,” explained Kaspersky’s Stan Kaminsky. “What makes matters worse is that abandoned apps can continue to collect data.” "about the phone and its owner and sending it to advertising companies, or simply eating up mobile phone data."
How to delete hidden apps on Android
Sometimes apps aren't even on your home screen. You may not even be able to find it in the App and Device Manager section of the Google Play Store.
In this case, your first port of call should be to go to Settings, then Applications, as this section contains a large list of installed applications that you can browse.
Look for suspicious apps you don't recognize or use, then tap on them to get more information.
You can then click Uninstall to get rid of it completely.
However, some apps on this list cannot be uninstalled this way, which is often the case if they were pre-installed by your phone manufacturer.
“However, it is not necessarily linked to the operating system or core components of the smartphone. It could be, for example, a Facebook client or a private browser,” Kaminsky said.
He continued: "These applications are often called bloatware because they increase the size of the phone's firmware and the list of standard applications."
Instead of an uninstall button, there should be an icon to disable it. Just click that button, it will not be able to remove the app from your phone, but it will stop it running and remove the icon from your screen.
Unfortunately, you won't save any storage space this way, but it will prevent the app from quietly collecting your data.
Some applications do not provide this disable button, as it appears in gray, and this may be because the application is important to your smartphone and should not be disabled.
"You should think carefully before trying to disable or uninstall such applications manually," Kaminsky said.
He recommended opening the search engine and typing “exact smartphone model number + exact app name” in the search window, which will show you Android user forum discussions at the top of the search results. This way you can know whether the app should be deleted or not.
One trick you can try is to press the Force Stop button, which stops the app temporarily without causing any permanent damage.
Freezing these applications is possible but very complicated, so you should research how to do it only if you have a lot of experience with technology, otherwise there is a very high risk of damaging your device.
That's dangerous.
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