My (crap) Sony phone came with a large array of preloaded apps that occupy a 70+% of internal memory. I don’t want to play games, watch movies or superimpose pictures of dinosaur over my photos, but on the App Manager thingie there is no option to uninstall them.
How can I get rid of them without buggering up the phone?

I bet it didn’t come 70% full. Try getting rid of all the stuff you’ve added.

Do you have an SD card? You should be able to transfer most apps to that.

Only added Strava and a Flight Sim.

Can’t transfer preloaded apps to the memory card.

Delete pics, vids and the rest

look up on youtube how to do a hard reset for your model.. that should clear most of ‘other storage’ nonsense

make sure you back up all the stuff that you want to keep first though

My ageing smartphone is usually good for about a year between resets

You could look at rooting it and installing Cyanogenmod on the phone – that’ll give you a faster, crap free phone. It’s a bit fiddly and voids your warranty. Remember to back up everything on your phone that you want to keep first.

Delete pics, vids and the rest

Already on the SD card.

Hook it up to a PC and delete the Thumbnails folder.

Rooting and Cyanogen / similar might be an option?

When you say there is no way to uninstall them, do you mean that you don’t get the red X uninstall option for the apps you mention?

My Xperia T has quite a few apps that can’t be uninstalled, but the Sony ones don’t seem to be that big. Some of the Google ones are a bit hefty though.

Have you deleted your cached data from the memory at all? That often clogs your phone up.
Go to Settings>Storage and there should be a coloured chart of memory usage; One for Device Memory & one for Internal Storage. One of the coloured bars will be cached data (for each storage location). If you select the cached data line, it will give you the option to delete cached data.

There should be some apps you can move to MicroSD though?

See ‘How to Move Android Apps to an SD Card’ here.

Have you deleted your cached data from the memory at all?

Every other day. Hence the reason to want to get rid of AR Effects, Hangouts, Play Games, Sketch and all of the other stuff.

I’m almost certain that to get rid of apps baked into the ROM you’ll need to root it and flash custom firmware. Uninstalling any installed updates to those apps might save you some space though.

I bet it didn’t come 70% full

If it’s an Aqua M4 8Gb then it’s probably true. I got one as an insurance replacement, after I used one for a week or so I onl;y had 1gb of storage space left on the phone – this was after moving photo’s and apps that could be moved onto an SD card.

As I didn’t want to faff about with having to constantly clean cache’s and move apps I got a Moto X Play in the black friday sales. Apart from the storage issues the phone was fine to use

If anyone wants a Sony Xperia Aqua M4 boxed with accessories then make me an offer ( email in profile )

I bet it didn’t come 70% full

Probably an even higher figure if it’s an 8gb Sony. Pretty poor cost cutting on memory coupled with bloated OS. As above it’ll need rooting to remove them.

Thanks.

My Ms’ S2 has a simlar problem, solved by clearing out some of the memory that acuulates.

1) Download the CCleaner app, it finds all the thumbnail folders and similar cache folders and empties them.

2) There was a log file on the S2 which accumulates stuff, I don’t know if it’s common accross ll andorid phones, but it was emptied by typing a code into the dial screen and clicking “sys log dump” or something like that in the menu that poped up. That was several GB the first time I did it.

Woot! Ccleaner just got rid of 500mb.

I have a Sony z3. Even though you cant uninstall all that crap, if you hit disable, it removes most of it freeing up space.

After, if you look in apps in the settings and swipe left a few times you can see all the stuff you disabled in case you want to re-enable any of it.

Got a Z1 here and uninstalling updates then disabling all the preloaded guff I don’t use freed up loads of space. Never had an issue with the Z1 tho… Justin like things tidy. Will try CCcleaner on the missus Xperia L which is constantly telling her she’s got no space.