by cmsellers » Thu Aug 02, 2018 7:58 pm
I need a phone, so I got a 20-dollar smartphone from TracFone. It mostly works like any other smartphone, which means that there are three things which are really annoying me.
The first is that you need to turn on mobile data to use it, but if you do this, it will keep switching from WiFi back to data, so I need to turn it off every time I have WiFi and on every time I want to use data.
The second is that it comes with a lot of apps that I do not want, like Facebook, Instagram, and 1Weather. I can disable but not remove most of them, however the 1Weather app cannot be disabled. I was able to turn off the data it was using in the background (and was pissed that it was doing it), but the only way to get rid of it completely involves rooting my phone. I remember from the last time that I tried to root an Android device that it was a giant pain in the ass and decided removing a weather app I do not want was not worth it.
However the third and currently most annoying thing is that this is a cheapass phone with 8 GB of space and no microSD slot. 4.8 GB is reserved for memory and 2.9 GB is used by the phone (ie available for apps, media, and cached space). 2.9 GB is not a lot, and I had a little over half a gig available before I installed Waze and Google Docs (around 200 MB together) and downloaded two playlists from KGNU (another 311 MB) to see if I can use the aux input on the loaner car I am driving.
I am now getting warnings that I am dangerously low on space, with 26 MB remaining, so I look at what is hugging my disk space. Two of the biggest culprits are those Facebook and Instagram apps I cannot uninstall (which together use 240 MB), without rooting my phone. Several Google apps I never use together add up to over 300 MB, though I am not sure if removing those would break Android. So I am now trying to root my phone, and yes, it is indeed a pain in the ass.