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My phone came with several non-uninstallable "factory apps". Three of these are Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Even though I have disabled these, and uninstalled any updates to save space, the updates keep getting re-installed.

How can I find out why this happens and how can I prevent this? The updates take more than 500 MB of space, which I don't want to waste on something I don't use.

More details:

  • This is a Samsung S7 running Android 8.0.
  • I disabled updates for these specific apps in Google Play (I had to temporarily re-enable them to be able to do this). I disabled all auto-updates in the Samsung Galaxy Store. There are no other app stores on this phone.
  • The apps stay disabled, yet updates are still installed for them, taking up storage.
  • These are the only factory apps that get forcibly updated. Other factory apps that I disabled don't get updated.
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    Not sure if it helps, but you could try to uninstall them via ADB using adb shell "pm uninstall --user 0 <packageName> (yes, that works for pre-installed apps without root – it basically removes them for the specified user only). As the package manager would no longer list them for your user then, play store should not see them either and thus no longer update them.
    – Izzy ♦
    Commented Sep 26, 2020 at 13:05
  • @Izzy Do I understand that in order to try this, I must install Android developer tools, which should contain ADB, connect the phone to the computer, then do this? I'm getting really desperate about this ...
    – Szabolcs
    Commented Nov 21, 2020 at 9:21
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    Not necessarily the entire developer tools, see: Is there a minimal installation of ADB? Basically, depending on your OS, you'd need just 3-10 files of the bundle, which you can eg find here.
    – Izzy ♦
    Commented Nov 21, 2020 at 12:55

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