Should I update those pre-installed programs that I never use? There are quite a number of applications that came pre-installed onto my phone when I bought it. I am unable to uninstall any of these without rooting my phone. Every now and then, Google Play will send me notifications of new updates for these software. Some of these, such as Gmail, YouTube and Hangouts belong to Google, others belong to third parties linked to my telco.

Whenever I perform an update on an application, I have to go through a list of App permissions and decide whether to grant those permissions. Some of these may request permission to access my address book, others may request certain controls on my Android system. These are privacy issues as well as security issues that I supposed many people will be facing.

In any case, how should one deal with these "unwanted" programs?
You might consider disabling those apps (starting with ICS, that's possible for some but not all) and "delete their updates". This way you'd solve multiple of your issues:


no more update reminders
app becomes unavailable, so it's no longer shown in the app drawer
being disabled, they should also no longer provide an "attack vector"
plus, the updates deleted, you save precious internal storage :)


If that's not possible for some apps via Settings → Applications (check the "All" tab there to see pre-installed apps), and rooting is an option, you can still freeze them with apps like Titanium Backup to achieve the same.

Update: Starting with Lollipop, you can use the pm hide command without root via adb. So in case disabling an app the common way (see previous paragraph) fails, that is still worth a try.