How To Disable Gear VR Service [100% Working 2024]

Are you tired of Gear VR randomly popping up on your Samsung phone? Are you getting frustrated with some services like Gear VR eating up a huge chunk of your battery?

Then you came to the right place. If you want to unleash the true power of your phone’s battery and stop annoying pop-ups, you will need to permanently get rid of annoying services like Gear VR.

What is the Gear VR service?

I have spent more than 8 hours looking for the easiest and most reliable method to stop all your headaches. I went through the same thing myself as I also use a Samsung phone but everything is working fine now that I have disabled the Gear VR service.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab yourself your daily dose of caffeine and stick with me till the end to find out exactly how you can eliminate all Gear VR issues.

What Is The Use Of Samsung Gear VR?

The use of the Samsung Gear VR headset is to provide a field-of-view for the Virtual Reality experience using your mobile phone. It acts as the controller that plugs into the USB-C or micro USB port of your phone. The headset itself does not contain any software. 

Before you go ahead and start disabling Gear VR services, you need to first think about whether you might have some use for it in the future.

You might be thinking that there’s a whole bunch of VR headsets out there now, so why use Gear VR? Well, Gear VR has an edge if you own a Samsung phone by providing specific applications suited for the phone and headset.

With that said, it is important to note that Samsung has officially confirmed that all the newer devices or phones that are on Android 12 will not have Gear VR installed. This isn’t all that surprising since there are no plans for a new Gear VR headset anytime soon.

So, Gear VR is not going to be useful for those who are on the latest Samsung smartphone but you can perfectly use all of Gear VRs services on its older devices.

All you have to do is go through our latest how to FIX Keep Gear VR Cool.

How To Disable Gear VR Service?

Now that you know whether Samsung Gear VR will actually be useful for you or not, let’s focus on the reason why you came to this page.

There are a couple of methods to do this so let’s start with the simplest first.

Here are the steps to disable the Gear VR service:

1. Unlock your Samsung phone and launch the settings application.
2. Scroll down and click on Apps.
3. Search for Gear VR from the textbox and click on the result.
4. Click on the Disable button on the bottom and confirm the pop-up.

That was pretty simple, right? Well, the bad news is it doesn’t work for everyone so don’t beat yourself up if you find the Disable option greyed out.

If you are facing issues with the previous method, then you can try several third-party apps from the Google Play Store to remove Gear VR services but there’s a catch. You will need to root your phone to be able to do this.

For those of you who have already rooted their phone, you can simply search for a Package disabler and simply disable Gear VR app with the push of a button.

However, if you are like me and want to keep the phone’s warranty in check, there is an alternative method to force remove the Gear VR packages from your phone. This method is a little advanced but don’t worry, I have kept things as simple as I could.

You will need access to a laptop and your data cable for this method. The first thing you need to do is install ADB (Android Debug Bridge) on your computer.

Check out our epic guide if you don’t know how to Change Your Name on VRChat.

Here are the steps to install ADB:

• Launch a web browser and search for Android SDK Platform-tools download on Google.
• Click on the first result from the official website.
• Scroll down on the web page to the Downloads section and click on the Download link for the Operating System you are currently using.
• Once the zip file has been downloaded, extract it to an easily accessible folder, preferably on your C drive.

After you have successfully installed ADB on your laptop or PC, you need to set up your phone for ADB debugging. Here are the steps to do that:

1. Launch the Settings app again on your phone and this time click on About Phone.
2. Click on the Software Information option on this page.
3. After that, locate the Build number and tap it 7 times after which you should see a toast message saying that you are a developer now.
4. Go back to the main page in Settings, scroll down to the newly available Developer Options and tap on it.
5. On the Developer Settings page, scroll down to the debugging section and turn on USB debugging.

But, before that, do check our latest post on the Watch 3D Movies on Gear VR.

Now that both your PC and phone are properly set up, here’s how you can delete all the Gear VR services from your phone:

1. Go to the folder where you extracted the downloaded ADB zip file earlier and do a right-click on an empty area. Select the option called Open in Windows Terminal or something similar.
2. Next, connect your phone to the PC using the data cable. I recommend using the cable you got with your charger as other cables have issues sometimes.
3. On your PC, type adb devices in the terminal window and press enter.
4. If you get an error, type in ./adb devices to fix the issue.
5. You will get prompt asking permission on your phone when you press enter, so accept that immediately.
6. Now, both the devices are connected. You need to delete three apps that are related to the Gear VR service. Type the following commands one by one and press enter.

adb shell pm uninstall -k –user 0 com.samsung.android.hmt.vrsvc

adb shell pm uninstall -k –user 0 com.samsung.android.app.vrsetupwizardstub

adb shell pm uninstall -k –user 0 com.samsung.android.hmt.vrshell

After that, you can disconnect both the devices and disable Developer options if you want.

That’s it! Gear VR services will not be bothering you anytime soon. If you go to the app list, you won’t see any Gear VR services.

One thing to note here is that if you ever format your phone, all the apps you deleted will reappear so you will have to type in the commands using adb again.

I would also recommend you to uninstall any Oculus apps while you are at it, since those are useless without Gear VR.

Also, check our separate post for fixing how to Fix PSVR Keeps Disconnecting.

FAQ

Question: What is Google VR services on Android?

Answer: Google VR services on Android is an application that offers additional functionality for virtual reality apps like Daydream and Cardboard. An example of such functionality is viewing notifications while wearing a VR headset.

Question: How do I turn off Samsung Gear VR controller?

Answer: You can turn off Samsung Gear VR controller by simply removing the batteries as instructed by the manual. However, I recommend you to leave it on standby for around five minutes after which it should turn off on its own as it has a sleep mode.

Final Thoughts

Gear VR services have gone crazy by overheating certain devices or occupying too much RAM. So, it’s not really surprising that lots of people want to get it off their phones. If you can simply disable it from settings, I recommend doing that. Otherwise, adb is your only option.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and if you have any other issues, you know where to reach us.