Re-enable Any Disabled Pre-installed System App
What if you disabled an app and want it back? It’s very easy to re-enable the app! First, go to Settings > Apps and look at the “All apps” list (it may be located somewhere different on your device.) Usually, you can filter here to see the names of all disabled apps. Once you know what app you want to re-enable, follow these steps:
1. Open a command prompt or terminal window and run the following command:
Windows Command Prompt: adb shell pm list packages -d
Windows PowerShell: .\adb shell pm list packages -d
Mac/Linux Terminal: ./adb shell pm list packages -d
2. This command lists all disabled packages. Find the package name that corresponds to the app you want to re-enable. Now, just run the following command to re-enable one of them:
Windows Command Prompt: adb shell pm enable <package_to_enable>
Windows PowerShell: .\adb shell pm enable <package_to_enable>
Mac/Linux Terminal: ./adb shell pm enable <package_to_enable>
3. If you have any issues, try rebooting after re-enabling the app.
What did we do?
First of all, it’s important to differentiate what this command does and why it’s superior to the method that we used in our previous
bloatware removal tutorial. In that tutorial, we uninstalled an application at a user level, which means it was still installed on the device in the system partition but not for the primary user (user 0). This is why to get it back you either needed to factory reset or sideload the APK. In this tutorial, we are disabling the app for the primary user rather than uninstalling it, which means that we can enable it without re-installing it again.
The pm disable-user command has been around for years, but it’s been overlooked in favor of pm disable. You would think that both pm disable-user and pm disable –user 0 would be identical, but you would be wrong. For some reason, the disable-user command lets you disable basically any application you want while the regular disable command is quite limited.
The best part about this method is that if you mess up and disable an application that you shouldn’t, it’s a really easy fix. You’ll also still receive OTA updates as you aren’t actually modifying any system files. That’s why we need the “–user 0” part of our command, which specifies that the app will only be disabled for the current user, not all users, which would require root access.