I like to try out lots of apps. Often a site like Lifehacker or Droidlife will feature several that are similar in functionality and I will install them all in order to compare features.
That leaves me with lots and lots of applications that I end up not wanting to keep. Unfortunately, I can only uninstall one at a time.
Is there an app or method that would allow me to uninstall a bunch at a time?
There are tons of apps that do batch uninstalling but here's a simple free one that I know works: Uninstaller Pro
A lot of the more full featured app managers also have a batch uninstall option. I like to consolidate functions into as few apps as I can. Now I use SmartBar which has a good app manager with batch uninstall.
Scripted via adb & pm (package manager):
If the SDK is installed and you like to use the commandline, that's about the quickest way I know of:
Downside: you only get to see the package names, not the friendly application names (There's seemingly no easy cli way. For programmers: get application name from package name)
Downside 2: Be sure what you do, you might uninstall every app on your phone if you don't edit the list.
# Use android's package manager 'pm'
# list all 3rd party pkgs (using the '-3' parameter)
me@local:~$ adb shell pm list packages -3 > /tmp/pkg.list
# Use whatever editor you like (grep, vi, GUI) to edit the list
me@local:~$ vi /tmp/pkg.list
me@local:~$ cat /tmp/pkg.list | sed 's,.*:,,' | while read a; do adb uninstall $a;done
Maybe also an improvement for a limited number of apps:
Google's Play Store now offers improved per device management (since around Google I|O 2012):
Go to My Android Apps (login required) and you see "Apps installed on [Device Model]". Per app you have an:
Using this you can easily uninstall apps on specific phones or tablets using your internet browser.
See also this accepted answer: Remotely uninstall apps?
It's been awhile since I used it, but AppBrain's app will let you sync to your AppBrain account... so it should uninstall apps you remove from your AppBrain account, but I can't verify that since I don't use it anymore.
Not a batch uninstall, but in LauncherPro you can drag and drop apps to the trash can, hover for a few seconds, and then drop to uninstall it (instead of removing it from the homescreen). Works from the app drawer too. This is the method I usually use.
There are a ton, aren't there?
One I'm looking at is Apps Uninstall.
A nice feature it has is the ability to mark apps to protect them from accidentally bulk uninstalling.
The problem with his method and most other methods I have seen (at least on my CentOS 6 and Ubuntu 10 machines) is that CRLFs were at the end of each line of the /tmp/pkg.list file, so the uninstaller instead of uninstalling com.google.chrome, was actually attempting to uninstall 'com.google.chrome^M' ... notice the CR return character. By doing dos2unix, there is 'Success', not 'Failure'. His sed script may have originally been a substitute for dos2unix, but was mangled when posted.
[CentOS6]# adb shell pm list packages > /tmp/pkg.list.txt
[CentOS6]# adb push /tmp/pkg.list.txt /tmp/
[CentOS6]# adb shell
android:/root # dos2unix /tmp/pkg.list.txt
android:/root # for f in \`cat /tmp/pkg.list.txt\`; do echo $f; pm uninstall $f; done;
The 'Failure' problem has more to do with the ADB shell appending a DOS line ending ^M (on CentOS Linux anyway).
Since I did everything from CentOS 6, I was surprised to be bitten yet again by 1980s technology that was never as good as the technology from 1969. I guess Google wanted to make things easier for Windows users of the ADB shell.
(I had edited (appended) to ce4's answer, but apparently that did not take.)
For Windows users, after generating the list packages like this
adb shell pm list packages -3 > pkg_third.txt
Open and edit this file, leave only packages that will be REMOVED.
In PowerShell, execute this script
Get-Content '.\pkg_third.txt' | ForEach-Object {
$packageNameCleaned = $_ -replace '.*:', ''
Write-Host "Removing $packageNameCleaned"
& adb uninstall $packageNameCleaned
}
