r/androidapps • u/DragonflyEven377 • 4h ago
QUESTION/HELP Debloating in 2026, no root, no PC β full writeup
Spent an evening getting a shell on my Fold 8 and debloating it. Two things wasted my time that I haven't seen mentioned much, so posting in case it saves someone else the trouble.
**LADB and Shizuku conflict.** Half the guides out there tell you to grab LADB as your post-reboot Shizuku helper. Its own README says it's incompatible with Shizuku, they both want the same wireless debugging socket. Repo's archived too. Use aShell You instead, it's built to run through Shizuku.
Which leads to the second one:
**aShell and aShell You are two different apps.** aShell is by sunilpaulmathew, aShell You is by DP-Hridayan. Both real, both work, aShell You is the more actively maintained fork with more backends. But if you search "ashell" you get both and the names are close enough that you should check the source repo before installing.
**Bonus thing that confused me:** Shizuku's "Authorized applications" counter said 0 the entire time, including after everything was demonstrably working. Don't troubleshoot based on that number. Run `whoami` in your shell app. If it returns `shell` you're good, if it returns something like `u0_a783` that's the app's own UID and it isn't authorized.
If you get a UID, force stopping the shell app and reopening it fixed it for me. Seems like it can launch before Shizuku's service is ready and just quietly give up.
**One more:** if `pm list packages` throws `SecurityException: Shell does not have permission to access user 150`, nothing is broken. That's a Knox container (Secure Folder or work profile) and shell can't see into it. Add `--user 0` to your commands.
Also worth knowing that my Shizuku survived reboots without any intervention, which the docs say shouldn't happen on a non-rooted device. Apparently Android 13+ has a trusted-WiFi auto-start path. So test yours before assuming you need the WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS workaround.
Wrote the whole thing up properly here if it's useful:
Stock Fold 8, locked bootloader, no PC needed for any of it.