I found Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify on my home, yet I never even visited their websites on this phone. I never recently installed or visited sus places, I ran a full scan with Kaspersky, found nothing. I disabled “MetaAppInstall” from the settings. I have a Redmi Note 12 Pro. I did some googling and it says for Facebook that it’s because of sponsorship. Is this it? You literally can’t escape from those apps even by never looking at them because your phone will force them on you? Or is there some other reason? Edit: I can uninstall them, and I did. It’s just that they installed themselves and I don’t want them to do it again

  • Cow_says_moo@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    You can escape from them by rooting your phone and installing a different OS. If you don’t do that, you’re at the whim of Xiaomi and its corporate deals.

    Installing another OS is not without risk and requires some technical skills though.

    • 6mementomori@lemmy.worldOP
      03·
      1 year ago

      what would you reccomend that has a similar enough look to MIUI? I really like the style but goddamn having ads in the file explorer is too much. I ran away from that by using adguard but if your phone will install apps for you…

      • ilikecoffee@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think you’d necessarily need a new OS to be honest. Once you’re rooted, you can just use your root privileges to uninstall any system/non-system app you want using one of several available apps. As for ads, I don’t have Xiaomi but you can try these.

        • nottheengineer@feddit.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          Xiaomi’s ROM is held together by spit and hope, screwing around in it with root access is basically guaranteed to break it sooner or later.

  • TimeMuncher2@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Yup, if your phone region is set to India, Redmi phones start installing lot of useless apps. I used some universal Android debloater on GitHub to remove all the spyware apps. Even disabled miui update, since it is the main reason these apps are installed.

  • vraylle@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Assuming Android? Had a similar issue with different apps. Turned out to be something called “Mobile Services” doing this. Some ads also used it to sideload apps. Found an article about this class of software and it’s apparently common on phones. Key was to look at the package names (I used the Package Names app). In my case, com.dti.tracfone. disabled THAT app and no more problem.

    Reference: http://telstramobileloop.com/what-is-mobile-services-manager/

  • Wooly@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    I was able to uninstall all those preinstalled apps with my Redmi note 10, maybe something changed with the newer models.