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Samsung devices, both phones, and tablets come with a Samsung’s customized user interface known as TouchWiz. This software is a part of the firmware and it is impossible to remove in non rooted devices. However, this is not true with rooted devices. And doing so leads to a disaster. That is why in this article I share my experience on why you should never attempt to remove Samsung TouchWiz. Hoping to prevents people from doing the same mistake I did.
Allow me to start the post by providing a little bit of background history. I own an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 3G which I barely use nowadays. It has low specs which even back in 2014 were not spectacular. But these days even doing a simple task such as web browsing is getting quite annoying with it. As the programs often hang and keystrokes are way too slow.
So out of sheer of boredom one night I have decided to root the device for the first time and try to improve its performance. My goal was simple. First, get rid of preinstalled crapware and then enable swap. If things did not work well, switch to a custom ROM.
I managed to root the device pretty easy, I will share it in the upcoming tutorial. After that, I have installed Titanium backup. And then started to remove a bunch of apps such as Polaris Office, Line, Google+, etc. I kept removing more and more software.
Finally, decided to get rid of TouchWiz UI. To me TouchWiz UI is slow and I am not a fan of its look and feel. But I was not aware that removing it screwing up everything. Well, my reasoning was once I got rid of TouchWiz, Android switches back to its default launcher. That is not the case. It caused a tremendous amount of pain that eventually, I had to reflash the stock ROM.
What happened was after I removed the TouchWiz, I restarted the tablet and then realized that it was not booting anymore. It stuck in the Samsung logo at the boot. That is not a biggie. Flashing the stock boot recovery and then stock ROM can solve the problem.
But this is where the issues began. First I had to find the stock boot recovery which was not a huge pain. Then I had to flash it (more on that in the upcoming article). Though, when it comes to finding the stock ROM, things get very difficult. Samsung does not allow a NORMAL USER to download the Archive ROMs. Hence, if you need it, you should become a PREMIUM USER which costs around 8.5 Euro. Well done SAMSUNG!!!
Hence, thanks to Samsung, finding out the correct stock ROM for old devices is like finding a needle in a haystack. And even after finding it I had to wait a good couple of hours to let the download finish. Because if Samsung does not allow to download the stock ROM for your device, why anyone in his right mind should allow to download it with full speed. In other words, I had to download the ROM from a third party site with a very super low speed, 115 kb/s.
One may suggest that reinstalling the TouchWiz should be possible if the zip file with the configuration is available without needing to flash the ROM again. Theoretically that is possible but good luck with finding the zip of the TouchWiz with the correct version and configuration!
That is it for this post and I hope you learn something. And remember never attempt to remove Samsung TouchWiz.
If you are interested in more Android related articles, have a look at the below link.
https://geekyhacker.com/android/
