Setting up a Samsung Galaxy Tab Active2

Recently picked up a “renewed” Samsung SM-T390NZKAXAR Galaxy Tab Active2 8" 16 GB Wi-Fi Ruggedized Tablet (a/k/a the SM-T390) for $54.99. (It seems to bounce between as low as $49.99 and a high price of $74, down from almost $400 a year ago.) For < $60 it was an impulse buy; I kinda want something larger than a phone that I can use in the shower / bath tub, that’s a bit more than an eReader. (My iPhone 16 Pro is IP68 rated, but it’s not an amazing device to read on, or do any sort of “real” work on.) 

The Galaxy Tab Active2 is an older device (introduced in October 2017, March 2018 in the U.S.), but it is also IP68 so it should survive such use. It’s still running Android 9, and fully updated, it’s on kernel 3.18.91-18310738, dating back to fall of 2021. So, definitely not state of the art, but it should do for what I need it to do.

As it arrived to me, it had 11.1 GB used, 4.9 GB free, of 16 GB total storage. Apps took up just 290 MB of that. It apparently has 3 GB of RAM, of which 1.4 GB was free in a freshly booted state.

Accessing the tablet’s storage

First step was to download OpenMTP to access the internal storage from my Mac, and copied over a few .apk files into Downloads:

• com.wireguard.android-1.0.20231018.apk - VPN access
• org.fdroid.fdroid_1015056.apk - open source “app store”
• Firefox-136.0.apk - Firefox (updated the already installed version)
• jackpal.androidterm-1.0.70-71-minAPI4.apk - Local terminal
• org.connectbot.apk - SSH client
• com.aldiko.android [3.0.25].apk - eBook reader
• com.adobe.reader.apk - PDF viewer
• jp.ddo.shigadroid.webdavfilemanager.apk - easy access to files made available via a WebDAV server

Then, using the Samsung bundled My Files app to browse to Internal Storage / Download, tap the .apk files and, if prompted, change the security settings to allow installation from that location.

For the price, I definitely like this thing. The screen (4.25x6.75") is the fairly standard among 8" Android tablets 16:10 ratio, a bit skinnier than the “looks more like a book page” 4:3 ratio common among Apple tablets, which makes it not ideal for PDFs, but it’s not even a tertiary machine, so I think it’ll work fine. Can I watch football in the shower? Can I read a book in the tub? Then I’m good.

Things I’m deleting or at least disabling:

• Samsung Email (75MB used)
• Samsung Internet (319MB)

(Turns out it’s not that easy to strip out the bloat. Sigh.)

What’s taking up all the space? These built-in apps take up at least 100 MB each:

• Chrome (227 MB)
• Google Drive (114 MB)
• Excel (155 MB)
• Firefox (304 MB)
• Galaxy Store (193 MB)
• Gmail (288 MB)
• Google (395 MB)
• Google Play services (889 MB)
• Google Play Store (190 MB)
• Maps (213 MB)
• OneDrive (182 MB)
• OneNote (287 MB)
• PENUP (163 MB)
• Photos (217 MB)
• PowerPoint (224 MB)
• Samsung Internet (319 MB)
• Skype (168 MB)
• Speech Recognition and Synthesis from Google (126 MB)
• Word (259 MB)
• YouTube (145 MB)

Yikes. That’s like 5GB right there, ~31% of the device’s total storage. This might be a solution? https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater