YOUR Android smartphone may be hiding apps that are quietly gobbling up storage – and potentially even spying on you.
Many apps are extremely easy to delete, but some are intentionally “hidden”.
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That can make it very difficult to uninstall them unless you know where to look.
Cyber-experts at Kaspersky have warned over the dangers of leaving these apps on your phone – and revealed how to scrub them from existence – in a special security memo.
The report notes that most phone owners have 80 apps installed – and 30% of those are “never used”.
This can cause several problems, cyber-experts say, including apps quietly “spying” on you.
“Such ‘ballast’ is harmful,” Kaspersky’s Stan Kaminsky explained.
“There’s less free space on the device; potential bugs and compatibility issues multiply; and even unused apps at times distract you with pointless alerts.
“To make things worse, abandoned apps can continue collecting data about the phone and its owner and feed it to advertising firms, or simply gobble up mobile data.”
How to delete “hidden” apps on Android
Sometimes apps aren’t on your Home Screen.
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And you might not even be able to find them in the Google Play app’s Manage Apps & Device section.
In that case, your first port of call should be to go to Settings > Apps.
This should have a large list of installed apps that you can trawl through.
Look for suspicious apps that you don’t recognize or use, then tap on them for more info.
You can then hit Uninstall to get rid of them completely.
However, some apps on this list can’t be uninstalled this way – that’s often the case if it was pre-installed by your phone maker.
“That said, it’s not necessarily linked to the OS or core components of the smartphone,” Kaminsky said.
“It could be, say, a Facebook client or a proprietary browser.
“Such apps are often called bloatware since they bloat the phone’s firmware and the list of standard apps.”
Instead of an Uninstall button, there should be an icon to Disable it.
Tap that instead: it won’t remove if from your phone, but it’ll stop it booting up and will remove the icon from your screen.
Sadly you won’t save any storage space this way – but it will prevent the app from quietly collecting your data.
Some apps will even have the Disable button greyed out, which makes your life even more difficult.
This may be because the app is vital to your smartphone and shouldn’t be disabled.
“You need to think very carefully before trying to disable or uninstall such apps manually,” Kaminsky said.
“Open your favorite search engine and punch in the query ‘exact smartphone model number + exact app name’.
“Most likely you’ll see Android user forum discussions at the top of the search results.”
Using this method, you can work out whether the app should be deleted or not.
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One trick to try is pressing the Force Stop button, which temporarily stops the app without causing any lasting damage.
Freezing these apps is possible but is very complicated, so you should only research how to do that if you’ve very tech savvy – otherwise it’s too much of a risk that you’ll damage your device.
