How can I use adb to uninstall all 3rd party user apps?

Question

I am trying to create a script that will retrieve and uninstall all user apps in one batch operation through adb. Does anyone know how I would be able to do this?

I can currently list out all 3rd party apps through

adb shell pm list packages -3

Could I somehow direct the list of packages this generates into an uninstall command in adb?

Answer 1

Try:

adb shell pm list packages -3 | cut -d':' -f2 | tr '\r' ' ' | xargs -r -n1 -t adb uninstall

• First part is to get 3rd party app package names
• second part is to split package names using delimiter :
• third part is to replace carriage return with space (sometimes it would be a problem in linux machines. Try removing this part and check if you face it)
• and the last one is for uninstalling one by one
  • r option will prevent xargs from running the command if there are no third party apps installed
  • n1 option is to pass one result value as argument at a time to the command
  • t is for printing the command being executed)

Hope it helps!!!

Answer 2

What seems to be the problem? It can be done with this one-liner:

adb shell "pm list packages -3 | cut -c9- | xargs pm uninstall"