android uninstall failed - adb uninstall

Question

attempted to force the uninstall in adb...

$ adb shell pm uninstall -k org.openintents.filemanager

Failure

....

$ adb shell pm list packages -f | grep -i manager
package:/system/app/FileManager.apk=org.openintents.filemanager   <== still resident

Not sure what went wrong here . Not sure what i can do.

used the internal application mgr and not an option there to delete it.

Answer 1

Use adb uninstall org.openintents.filemanager.

Answer 2

Edit: when I saw the comment to CommonsWare answer I did not realize it was the same as the asker... anyways, a little explanation may be useful for somebody.

As yourself commented, the easiest way to uninstall a system app is plainly to delete the .apk file. The adb install / adb uninstall commands are useful for regular apps, not system apps. Since this apk is located in /system/app, adb uninstall will not remove it.

You can use the command suggested (rm /system/app/YourApp.apk), but before the /system folder need to have write access. You will need to see how to remount /system in your specific device, try searchig for "android remount +rw /system" and your device).

Alternatively, you may use any app that can do both deletion and remounting and has root access, such as Root Explorer and Astro

Answer 3

When manually deleting application from /system remember to delete their corresponding data folder in /data/data/«identifier»

There is also a track of the previous apk signature in /data/system/packages.xml that can prevent a reinstall of a rebuilt package with a different key.

Answer 4

The 'Failure' problem has more to do with the adb shell appending a DOS line ending ^M (on CentOS Linux anyway). Put the list of applications to uninstall in a file and copy to the android device directly.

root@android:/root # dos2unix list-of-apps-to-uninstall.txt     
root@android:/root # for f in `cat list-of-apps-to-uninstall.txt` ; do echo $f; pm uninstall $f; done;