[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy Note 3] sshafranko:
Guys just a quick heads up for anyone brave enough to attempt some debloating on 4.3. I have been messing around quite a bit and I made a mistake in the approach I was taking unfortunately learning the hard way. I figured I would remove as many apks as possible and see what happens, mostly I removed all the same stuff I did on 4.1.2 and then all the goodies that I dont and probably will not use, which is a lot of things for me as I like it plain and simple. Well that turned out to be a nightmare and within a couple days of doing this my phone was spitting out so many unfortunately this and that has stopped that it basicaly rendered my phone useless and I had to revert to a back up. So I decided to start all over and this time I am going to try and figure out which apps are tied together and need to be left alone so that funcionality is not compromised.

For example today I removed 5 apks. Upon removal I decided to create a couple albums in Story Album to organize some of the pictures in my gallery. After creating the album and attempting to save it I get story has stopped error. Since I only pulled 5 apks it was simple enough to figure out which one would tie in with Story and sure enough it was Blurb.apk. After moving it back to system> app all was good again.

Now it seems that magazines is one to really be careful with. 2 days ago I removed a lot of apks as I mentioned earlier, and last night after recieving an mms in the stock messaging app, I could not even open it to view the message. I got these errors constantly crowding my screen and my phone even rebooted a couple times before I took a log and decided to restore:

Messeging has stopped

Magazines has stopped

Watch on has stopped

System has stopped and

Magazine here and now has stopped

During Dwitherells explorations through various apks according to him he states that he noticed there are far more interconnections hard coded between apks in 4.3 TW than he has seen in the past.

So in conclusion if you are going to attempd debloating I would suggest to have a back up of a fully bloated rom you are using. Also instead of creating a list of what can be removed like the 100s of others out there, im going to try and compose a list of apps that work in conjunction with one another and should all be removed to avoid errors or none at all. It would be cool if someone else finds anything to post it here also so that we can all help each other. This is really disappointing to me as I love removing 500mb of crap ill never use especially the battery sucking apps constantly running in the backround which we dont use but are running because they were triggered by another app or process. To me this is like advancing the timing on a Mustang/Camaro/Cuda for some extra free horsepower, but now the timing is tied in with the fuel regulator and when you advance the timing the fuel pressure goes down. Lol So heres a start although a very small one its a start and I hope others will post their findings also if you happen to run across something.

Blurb.apk > needed for Story Album to work

My Magazine > tied to Watch on, Magazine here and now, Flipboard, Email, Messeging

If Magazines is removed completely you will get an error every time you receive a notification in your pull down for the stock Email app.

N3