Facebook’s App Cannot Be Deleted From Certain Samsung Phones

If you own certain Samsung phones, it seems that you can more or less forget about taking part in the #DeleteFacebook movement simply because you literally cannot delete Facebook. According to a report from Bloomberg, it seems that there are some Samsung phone owners who have recently discovered that they are unable to delete Facebook from their phones.

This isn’t a bug as it was discovered that the most that these users could do was “disable” the app. According to one of those users, Nick Winke, “It just absolutely baffles me that if I wanted to completely get rid of Facebook that it essentially would still be on my phone, which brings up more questions. Can they still track your information, your location, or whatever else they do? We the consumer should have say in what we want and don’t want on our products.”

Facebook has since confirmed that this is the case, but argues that by “disabling” the app, it is essentially the same as it being deleted as it will no longer collect information about the user as long as it has been disabled. Researcher Jane Manchun Wong shared some additional information about this where she notes that the Facebook app exists as a “stub” (essentially an empty shell/placeholder for the actual app) when shipped on Samsung phones.

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Samsung only ship the stub version of Facebook on their phones. It’s basically a non-functional empty shell, acts as the placeholder for when the phone receives the “real” Facebook app as app updates https://t.co/KHdkF9fFyK

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) January 8, 2019

This means that Facebook is right because when the app has been disabled, it is then reverted back to a stub meaning that while the shell is there, the app itself isn’t. You could think of this as how sometimes when you uninstall software on your computer, the folder of the software still remains even though its contents are empty.

We suppose this is reassuring, although why users cannot delete Facebook and trace evidence of it entirely from a phone that they’ve paid for is unclear.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Apps, Facebook, Samsung