How to Remove Pre-Installed Apps from a Samsung Galaxy S III

A brand new Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a number of built-in stock apps that some call “bloatware.” If you never plan on using any of these pre-installed apps, then they just take up space and clutter up your Apps menu.
Since the apps come installed with the phone, you can’t actually uninstall them like you can for apps you personally download. But there are ways to either disable the apps or hide them.

  1. Go to Settings, then Application Manager. Swipe left through the ‘Downloaded’ and ‘Running’ tabs to get to the ‘All‘ section.
  2. Inside the ‘All’ tab, scroll down to the stock app you want to disable. Click on it, and then click the Disable button in the top right. If you do not see the word Disable, but you see ‘Uninstall Updates’ then click that instead. Afterwards the Disable button will appear. If you want to undo what you disabled, you can find the disabled apps at the very bottom of the list in the ‘All’ tab. Disable these at your own risk, but these are the ones I disabled:

    AllShare Play: unnecessary
    ChatOn: seems to replicate functions the phone does anyway
    Game Hub: seems like mostly kids games & I can get games from Google play anyways
    Google +: I don’t need it.
    Media Hub: I don’t plan on purchasing through Samsung’s app
    Music Hub: Ditto.
    S Suggest: why not just use Google Play?
    Samsung Apps: I don’t see a reason not to just use Google play
    Talk: I might as well just text

Some of the stock apps cannot be disabled (the Disable button will be greyed out). In that case, there is still a way to remove the app icon from the app menu.

  1. Once in the apps menu, hit the Menu button. Click Hide Applications. This will place check boxes on each icon so that you can select which ones to hide. If you ever want to undo what you hid, there will be a new option in after you hit the Menu button called ‘Show hidden applications.’ These are the apps I had to hide this way since I couldn’t disable them:

    More Services: it just seems to link to the Samsung Apps
    VPN Client: I don’t currently need it, so I might as well disable it

I decided to leave a few of the stock apps for now in case I use them, such as Play Books, Play Magazines, Play Movies & TV, and Play Music. However, they can be disabled just as easily.