Settings for bundled apps

Using /e/OS Settings
1

I searched through the forum but am not sure if this has been asked before.

I would like to configure some of the builtin apps, for example:

  • Completely disable the email app (I use FairEmail) but I cannot because all apps bundled with /e/OS are grayed out. Android and LineageOS do not gray out the config to disable bundled apps, so I suspect it’s possible to allow the user to disable builtin apps on /e/OS too.
  • Adjust notifications per text conversation in QKSMS. Vanilla QKSMS obviously allows this. There is basically no protection from anyone with your number dosing your phone unless you block their number or go on Do Not Disturb mode permanently. For the entire phone. Forever. Worse, the notification banner still randomly drops in front of whatever else you are trying to do, effectvely giving anyone in the world with your number permanent phone pranking abilities. There are some apps and contacts I want to always get through and I do not want to block family/friends just because they ping my phone often. As a compromise/incomplete workaround have tried setting the app notification sound to None, and that worked for a while, but today text notifications started using the global notification sound again.
  • There are other examples.

Again, these are not problems I have had on LineageOS or Android. I want to continue to use and support /e/OS, but the inability to configure bundled apps has become a major usability issue for me.

Is there any way to reenable or override the settings for builtin apps?

2

Yeah that annoys me when bundled apps don’t allow you to disable them, they do that a lot for seemingly no reason in Android.

For apps that have a greyed or missing “disable” in the apps settings, you can often use the following terminal command to override it;

adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 [package name]

Some apps require higher privileges. Depending on the build you may be able to enable “root debugging” from Developer options and issue the command “adb root” to elevate privileges.

I always recommend against uninstalling. If you disable an app and something breaks you can easily revert it. Most of these apps don’t take up much space and it’s not worth the potential for headaches in removing them. Also some apps supply components used by other parts of the system so uninstalling can break stuff where disabling will not.

BTW, most of these alternative ROMs such as /e/os, LOS, IodeOS, CalyxOS are still Android. They’re based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project). The difference between those and OEM versions of Android is the software layered on top of AOSP.

1 Like
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Thanks for the help. I worked around the disabled settings for the bundled QKSMS by installing QUIK SMS from F-Droid and setting it as the default texting app. Evidently QKSMS was abandoned, and QUIK SMS is the successor project. They have even added more features, like the ability to select text within a message.

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I’d like to uninstall/disable the bundled weather widget, as I am using a different one, but that doesn’t seem possible. Also, I’d like to disable the notifications for the mail app, as I am only using it for my secondary mail (primary is Tuta), but that doesn’t seem possible either.

5

I’m also using a different weather widget and I was able to disable the BlissWeather app. Don’t remember if I had to do it from the command line or not.

Looks like shutting off mail notifications is greyed out, there might be a way to override it from the command line, but I haven’t looked into that. Might be able to find something with a web search.

1 Like
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For the moment, i just took away all the permissions from the Bliss weather app, so it’s practically disabled, and logged out of all mail accounts on the bundled mail client, so there won’t be any notifications.