Photo by Jon Moore on Unsplash
Xiaomi is big brand in mobile market, especially in India it’s number one mobile brand. People loves to use xiaomi’s product because it’s feature rich and cheap. Except 1–2 players, nobody is selling phones with high feature and low price as compared to xiaomi. That’s what make them big brand.
Xiaomi owns one of the best android UI skin- MIUI.
MIUI is my favourite Android UI- Except bloatware and lots of ads 😠
MIUI has lots of bloatware and annoying ads that drastacally harming user experience. That’s where some phishy things happens. There is one (useless) system app called Clean Master (under Security app) which is used to clear your unnecessary files (look’s like Android itself is not taking care of this things 😄). Now you will ask, what is wrong with it as tons of cleaner apps are available on Play store. But the things here is, it’s developed by one of the most notorious company on play store known as Cheetah Mobile. They are infamous for collecting lot’s of user data and selling it to ad provides. Here’s what their official site says about ads :
Cheetah Ads is Cheetah Mobile’s self-operated ad platform offering a wide range of ad formats, from high-performing display and native ads, to beautiful, full-screen vertical video. Cheetah Ads offers diverse, global reach with over 600 million users from 200+ countries and regions across Cheetah Mobile’s owned and operated inventory, including Clean Master, CM Security, Cheetah Keyboard. Enhanced by Cheetah Mobile’s artificial intelligence and big data capabilities, Cheetah Ads helps brands reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right format throughout the entire purchase cycle.
When you first start clean master app, it ask you to upload your folder details!! Moreover, here’s the list of permissions requested by Clean Master app
Does Cleaner app really need this type of permission to function properly, obviously not. They need this permission to gather data about you so they can sell it to advertisers and earn tons of money.
Xiaomi has another phishy app called Kika keyboard for xiaomi which is also developed by Cheetah mobile. Now cheetah mobile can even see what you type in your device. 😉
So the question is why xiaomi is shipping this infamous apps with their devices ? The roots are deep. Cheetah mobile is owned by Kingsoft Corporation and Lei Jun is chairman of this company. Lei Jun is also chairman and CEO of xiaomi !!! Hope it make sense.
Now, how to remove this (and similar other) apps from your device to protect yourself ? Here’s the steps to follow :
- Go to settings -> About phone
- Click 7 times on MIUI version to enable developer option
- Go to Additional settings -> Developer options -> enable USB debugging
4. Download Xiaomi app removal tool (jar file): https://tlgur.com/d/4yA6N0b4
5. Connect your phone with PC, open downloaded tool and click on Menu -> Check for device
6. You can see list of apps to uninstall. If you want to uninstall apps shown in tool, just select it and press uninstall.
7. To uninstall Clean master (and similar apps), add app by it’s package name and uninstall it
Now you can sit back and relax. Cheetah mobile isn’t watching you via this apps.
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