I recently bought my first ever mobile phone. Sony M4 aqua. Now I am on a very steep learning curve on this never even having used one up to six months ago.

I saw the post about bloatware on laptops and it made me think – this phone is full or bloatware to the point it has hardly any internal storage left. I have deleted every app on it that I don’t want and will never use but loads of stuff remains on it that can’t be deleted in any way I can see.
ay way of getting rid of them? there are around 40 apps preinstalled with no uninstall option.

Any clues for a clueless old man?

It’s an issue with Sony phones. They come so full of stuff that you need to buy the larger memory version to actually put a useful amount of apps on them. Unfortunately that’s a bit late for you now if you’ve already bought the 8gb version. Only option (other than taking it back) is to root it and put a custom Rom on it. Not that hard but maybe not ideal for a newby and may invalidate your warranty. Not that the warranty counts for much with Sony ime 😈

You can put a microSD card into it (up to 256GB) so that should be plenty of space. I can’t remember if Android lets you move apps to the SD card though.

You can move certain aps to an SD card. I’d probably return it to the shop/contract supplier and ask them for a phone that works properly straight out of the box.

I have a micro SD card in it but I don’t think you can move the rubbish on to it.

Unfortunately it met my spec in all other ways – big screen, waterproof. decent battery life and cheap

It seems to work OK as far as I can tell tho – its me thats confused by a phone cleverer than me

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2015/10/latest-xperia-m4-aqua-update-removes-bloatware/

Move everything else to the SD card. My Sony gets full easy – I seem to think they give enough memory for a good few apps (Inc bloat) , but any media should be on SD.

Edit ; you could try clean master app, don’t know how much I trust the figures it kicks about about space cleared out.

Ta chaps

What you can move to the SD card depends on the version of Android. Cheap phones tend to have an old version (not upgradable) that won’t allow Apps to be put on the SD. Discovered this after buying cheap 8gb phone for FIL, nice big screen etc and £100 but quite limited as a result.

I’m not joking, if you ordered it on the web send it back now, if you got in from a shop take it back now. My wife has the same phone and the memory issue is terrible. The phone will stop downloading emails etc etc because it is full. Do some reading online, everyone has issues with this phone because of the lack of memory. I reduced my wife’s to about two or three extra apps and disabled as much as possible and it still has issues with memory. Every week she hands it to me and i have to delete stuff to free up memory.

You have been warned 🙂 if you don’t beleive me do some reading online.

Depending on how tech savvy you feel, you could try unlocking the bootloader and installing a custom ROM with none of the pre-installed crap. Sounds fairly technical, but there are instructions online and it’s more time consuming than anything.

Other than that, a microSD card and telling the phone to store everything on it might be the simplest way. There’s usually an option within the app to select SD storage over phone storage.

Other than that, a microSD card and telling the phone to store everything on it might be the simplest way.

That’s generally good advice For other phones but I don’t think people realise quite how tight for space this phone is. It really does limit how you can use it. Personally I’d never buy another Sony anyway having seen too many fail and their poor warranty support but the small memory ones really should be avoided by all. They do seem to have managed to get good battery life so I’ll give them that though.