This guide will walk you through how to sleep and disable apps on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, and review the benefits of disabling them. Both phones come with a series of Samsung, carrier and even Amazon apps pre-installed, which often waste space and are rarely used.
There are several reasons why you might want to do this. By disabling an app, it will no longer be visible on the phone or app tray, which is a quick way to clean up your phone. Also, you might want to uninstall an app to save space or put some apps to sleep while you're at work to avoid interruptions.
Samsung actually offers three different methods to manage apps on the Galaxy S8. We can uninstall some of them, disable everything that came pre-installed, and put apps to sleep to prevent them from draining battery life in the background.
The reason most users choose to disable apps is to remove bloatware. What is bloatware? These are the dozens of Amazon, Samsung, Verizon, T-Mobile, NASCAR, and Lookout Mobile security apps that come preinstalled on your phone.
How to Disable Apps on Galaxy S8
There are actually two different ways to disable apps on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. The first is to go to the apps tab in settings and manually disable each app you want to get rid of. Here are step by step instructions.
Once you disable an app, it will no longer be visible anywhere on the phone. We recommend that you exercise caution and only disable apps that you know won't cause problems by being removed. I disabled everything from Amazon, AT&T, AT&T Data Usage Manager, Lookout Mobile Security, PDF Write and a few others. That was a total of 13 apps on my Galaxy S8.
The second method is even faster although you won't see them all listed like our instructions above. Simply press and hold any icon on the home screen or app tray. From there, a small pop-up window with options and controls will appear. You can select multiple apps at once, remove home screen shortcuts, or sleep and disable that specific app. This is the best route if you only need to quickly disable an app or two.
Long press the app icon, tap disable and tap confirm or OK. It will disappear from the app tray and be disabled forever. You can head to Settings > Apps > and find this app and re-enable it at any time if you want to restore it.
How to Sleep Apps on the Galaxy S8
Another option for Galaxy S8 owners is to put apps to sleep. Putting an app to sleep will prevent it from using battery life in the background. This is useful if an app is malfunctioning or you know an app is using more battery than it should. A good example of this is Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
Keep in mind that sleeping apps may not receive updates or be able to send you notifications for incoming messages until you wake them up.
Press and hold any app icon on the home screen or in the app tray, as mentioned earlier. If the app can be slept, you'll see "Sleep" listed in the options popup. Let go of the screen and select Sleep, read the warning that you will miss notifications and press OK to put it to sleep.
Now this app will be temporarily closed and won't use battery life. When you're ready, tap the app icon again to turn it back on. The app will wake up and resume full functionality.
In some cases, it is enough to put an application to sleep. However, in other situations, it may be beneficial for users to follow our instructions above and disable apps and bloatware altogether. While you're here, take a look at these awesome Galaxy S8+ cases.