How to recover when the Android rooted De-Bloater app puts your device into a boot loop

The rooted De-Bloater app by Sunil Paul Mathew offers a powerful method to disable Android apps on rooted devices. Too powerful, perhaps – it’s all too easy to disable something crucial, and put the device into a boot loop. When this happens, it’s likely to be impossible to run the De-Bloater app’s user interface to restore the missing functionality, and thus break the boot loop. Running the Android device’s “safe mode” start-up probably won’t help, because the de-bloating happens too early in the boot process.

To recover from this situation, you need to disable and then reconfigure the De-Bloater app, which you’ll only be able to do once you’ve prevented it running at boot time.

Here is a quick guide to doing this. There’s no new or secret information here – I’ve just merged a few documentation pages into a simple list of steps.

Pre-requisites

• An Android device rooted using Magisk. If you’ve gotten into this mess, I presume you’re already rooted, but this procedure probably won’t work with any rooting method other than Magisk.
• A computer with the adb utility installed
• A USB cable to connect the computer to the mobile device
• A willingness to delete files from the Android device at the command prompt.

Procedure

1. When the Android device reboots, as soon as the screen goes black, hold the volume-down button before any boot animation appears. Then release it as soon as the animation appears. This should enable Magisk’s safe mode without enabling the device’s built-in safe mode.
2. The device should now boot successfully, with Magisk (and thus the De-Bloater) disabled, but with the Magisk app still available.
3. In the Magisk app, deny superuser rights to the De-Bloater app.
4. Reboot the Android device again; with luck it will succeed now.
5. Enable USB debugging, if you haven’t already.
6. Connect your computer to the Android device using a USB cable.
7. On the computer, run adb shell.
8. In the shell, run su. Confirm that you want superuser rights if Magisk prompts you. Then rm -rf /data/adb/modules/De-bloater. This will remove any existing De-Bloater configuration.
9. Restore superuser rights to De-Bloater in the Magisk app.
10. Reboot. You should how have a working De-Bloater app, but with nothing disabled. You’ll need to repeat the process of removing the bloat you want to remove.

Notes

• The De-Bloater app does not (so far as I know) provide a way to save or export the list of components that it’s disabling. It’s best to keep a manual record, so you can re-disable the components that did not break the device, once you have it working again.
• In principle, you can re-enable specific components by editing the files in /data/adb/modules/De-bloater, and this ought to be more efficient than removing the De-Bloater configuration completely. However, stock Android does not provide any useful tools for doing this, even at the command prompt.
• If you’re running a custom recovery, you might be able to delete the De-bloater/ directory using tools provided by the recovery, rather than adb. I can’t advise on this, as there are multiple custom recovery tools in use.
• Some Android devices won’t go into an endless boot loop even when they won’t start. Instead, they’ll enter eventually enter some kind of recovery mode. You might need to force a reboot from that state, to get the device to boot again.
• The timing of pressing and releasing the volume-down button is quite fussy. You might need to repeat the process a few times. If you hold the button too long, you’ll enable the Android safe boot mode, which will probably prevent you running Magisk to disable the De-Bloater.