Is it possible to disable Google Play indefinitely?

Question

I have an HTC Desire. This phone sadly has very limited internal memory although plenty of memory card memory. Since owning it I've become accustomed to moving any apps I download onto the SD card and using the internal memory as little as possible. Unfortunately some applications insist on being installed in the internal memory. Some of these applications (Adobe Acrobat and Google Maps for example) have become larger and larger as more updates have come from Google and I've had to uninstall all updates for them, settling for the basic versions which came with the phone and cannot be uninstalled. (In the two cases listed these versions are far leaner and better anyway).

Unfortunately Google is working against me in my crusade to continue using my phone. A year or so ago they forcibly upgraded the simple Market app (which took up very little space) with the 10Mb "Google Play Store". I had sufficient space for this until they also forcibly installed "Google Play Services" which uses a further 6Mb. This now causes my phone to be unusable every morning (low disk space) when the update happens and every morning I uninstall it again before I go to work.

Does anyone know if it's possible to disable the updates for Google's own market place? The old Market app does still work very well once you've uninstalled Google Play but I can't find a way to make that permanent.

Answer 1

With ICS and up (i.e. Android 4.0+), or if you consider rooting your device, there is something else you could do:

• Freeze the MarketUpdater using Androids Manage Applications (ICS and up) -- or, before ICS, e.g. TitaniumBackup
• optionally uninstall all updates to the Playstore app

Alternatively, maybe even better (depending on the version of Market/Playstore app pre-installed on your device) -- but requires root (as the Legacy Play Store needs to be installed as system app):

• Freeze the MarketUpdater as above
• Freeze the Playstore app along =:-0
• Install Legacy Play Store instead :-)

No more updates (as that Legacy Play Store won't be updated -- it's an older version of the Playstore/Market app, patched to be used in parallel to the recent version; it has some features which were removed from the current versions), and a less-overloaded Playstore app are the results.

Answer 2

I had an HTC Desire some time ago, the solution for this kind of problem is to use any App2SD method.

The idea behind App2SD is the following: 1. Partition the SD card to add a 512Mb partition. 2. Symlink the directory /data of your phone to that partition.

With that, you will have a "virtual" /data of 512Mb (enough to install a lot of apps) and the phone won't be whining about free space. You will need to have a custom recovery in order to achieve this (root not needed). You can check some Apps2SD scripts in the XDA Forum. You will only need to follow the instructions there, but is as simple as partitioning the SD card (you can do that from the recovery) and flashing a zip file.

Answer 3

You can use Lucky Patcher to remove system apps (freeze package or uninstall), although, I recommend not doing so, because it can result in a soft-brick.