How to Disable Blinkfeed on the HTC One M9

Now that the shiny new two-tone aluminum HTC One M9 smartphone is available on carrier shelves, buyers are starting to get it and set everything up. One of the most popular features of the One series is Blinkfeed. HTC’s own custom app designed to deliver news, sports, social, and even email updates all right to the users homescreen in one place. A news and information aggregator tool of sorts, and here’s how to disable it.

While the beautiful hardware and aluminum design of the HTC One M9 has been one of the main attractions, not to mention the improved new camera, it’s the subtle changes and improvements to Android 5.0 and Sense UI 7 that really brings the experience home for many users. Blinkfeed is one of our favorite features, as is the theme engine, but not everyone wants that taking over their homescreen.

Read: HTC One M9 Review

When it comes to changing or customizing a smartphone there are tons of options available with the new On M9, mainly because of the theme tool. The HTC One M9 is a popular smartphone that’s available in multiple colors on all carriers, and Android as a whole allows for so much customization that sometimes it can be confusing. If you just want simple instructions to remove Blinkfeed from your device, read on past the break.

Blinkfeed is like an RSS feed or news aggregator that brings you news articles, sports alerts or info, social network updates and mentions, weather alerts and more. It’s extremely useful, but if you’d like to get rid of it we know exactly what you’ll need to do.

With the One M9 HTC has changed of lot about HTC Sense. There’s a widget on the homescreen that predicts what apps are used the most and puts them in a box on your main screen. It’s nice but changes often, so I removed it. Then, I also wanted other apps to the side of my main screen, but this is where HTC Blinkfeed is. So lets get rid of it.

Instructions

Whether you want to disable Blinkfeed completely as the title suggests, or even change it so it is the default screen you see when you hit home, the instructions below do both. One area will let you change homscreens in an extremely simple fashion, as well as remove an entire homscreen or Blinkfeed with the touch of a button.

Simply long-press any blank area of any screen, and you’ll see a familiar popup on Android for home screen options. Wallpaper, Apps and widgets, or Manage home screen pages. The second two both will work, but select “Manage home screen pages”. Here you can pan through all your home screens, and the far left is Blinkfeed. Simply navigate to it, and select remove. That’s it, and it is now completely gone. Leaving that area blank for the user to add apps they’d like there, instead of Blinkfeed.

Another route is inside of Blinkfeed itself. While inside of Blinkfeed tap the three-lines at the top left, which brings the slide-out navigation menu. Then tap the three dots menu button, tap settings, and scroll down to “manage home screen panels”. This is where you can remove it, or even set it as your main homescreen with the set as home button.

This brings you to the same menu as before. Then all you need to do is swipe to the Blinkfeed panel and select remove. It’s that easy, and can be done in under a minute. This removes Blinkfeed completely and you’re all done.

Now that you’ve cleaned up some space on your screen you can use the 5-inch display to add new app icons, widgets and more. Then, as we said above, try the new theme engine out and change the look and feel of your device even more. Stay tuned for more HTC One M9 news, coverage, how tos and more.