RedMi Note 11. Just received it for Christmas and boy was I crying the first time I booted it. 1 Gb of bloatware must most importantly: impossible to uninstall chrome.

That is ok if any other browser can co-exist beside it… Boy was I wrong again. Some links from apps don’t even care about my default browser, they just open chrome cause hell yeah.

This is sickening me, Google is beginning to really disgust me. Someday I’ll root this mf to get rid of ALL the bloatware

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Sounds like your RedMi really messed up their OS if they don’t use your default browser.

    You can disable Chrome, but not uninstall it, because Chrome is what backs the modern WebViews used in all kinds of apps. Before, we used to have this separated (a WebView and a browser, both taking up half a gigabyte of storage), and before that we had the even worse situation of “WebView implementation is built by the manufacturer when the phone was released and becomes a malware vector the day the first security update comes out”. The current implementation saves a lot of storage space.

    That said, some apps opt into “custom tabs”, which are Chrome/Firefox tabs that behave like they’re part of their parent app. If you’re running into those, you can either try disabling them (usually a setting) or start using apps that don’t exhibit this behaviour. These tabs don’t appear when opening a web page normally, they’re opt-in features the developer needs to specifically call out to. I’m not sure if any browsers beside Chrome and Firefox implement the protocol, but you can ask your browse vendor about Custom Tab support if you want to be sure.

    For the bloatware (these cheap phones come packed with that shit), I recommend taking a backup and looking at the common debloater tools (there’s one I used that works straight from the web browser through the magic of WebUSB) to disable apps. You won’t be getting any storage space back because that’s not how storage works on Android phones, but you’ll save yourself some battery life and frustration by disabling bloatware apps. That said, don’t just disable anything labeled as “Google” or you’ll have to reset to factory settings when you inevitably disable some system service.

    Your specific issues don’t seem to have much to do with Google, more with RedMi and the apps you’re using.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        If you’re running a custom ROM then it’s possible that the WebView implementation is a custom one (i.e. not updateable by Google, but updated by the ROM makers instead, like Vanadium on GrapheneOS), but I’m pretty sure Google linked their Chrome runtime pretty tightly against their Android WebView implementation to save storage (previously you basically had to full copies of Chrome on your device, now Chrome and the WebView API share the same library that gets updated alongside Chrome).

        That said, the TriChrome library is pretty much hidden from the UI, so you may not notice that Chrome is actually still installed in the background. The Chrome “app” is basically a UI library in top of the Google Chrome code that’s packaged as a system library, but if you were to remove everything that comes with “Chrome” you now break the WebView as well.

        This is something that changed as of Android Q so earlier versions may still have the separation, but if you can update the WebView from the Play Store, there’s an almost complete version of Chrome hiding in your system these days.