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How to Disable Blinkfeed on the HTC One M8

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One of the most popular features of the original HTC One and the new HTC One M8 is Blinkfeed. HTC’s own custom app designed to deliver news, sports, social, and even email updates all right to the users homescreen.

While the beautiful hardware and aluminum design of the HTC One M8 has been one of the main attractions, it’s the subtle changes and improvements to Android 4.4 KitKat and Sense UI 6.0 that really brings the experience home for many users. Blinkfeed is one of our favorite features, but not everyone wants that taking over their homescreen.

Read: HTC One M8 vs LG G3: 5 Key Differences

When it comes to changing or customizing a smartphone there are tons of options available. The HTC One M8 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

Blinkfeed is like an RSS feed or news aggregator that brings you news articles, sports alerts or updates, 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.

One thing that has caused a lot of user frustration is hitting the home button on the HTC One M8 actually takes you to Blinkfeed, rather than to your main Android screen that most users see. The page where you’re Google Search widget and most popular apps usually hang out. As a result, you’re constantly scrolling over out of Blinkfeed and into your homepage. Below we’ll explain how to change your homescreen to not be Blinkfeed, and how to disable the service and app altogether.

Read: How to Change Apps on the HTC One M8 Lockscreen

Instructions

Whether you want to disable Blinkfeed completely as the title suggests, or even change it so it isn’t 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 bottom.

Simply long-press any blank area of the screen when you aren’t in Blinkfeed, 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”.

M8-blink

From here it’s actually just two taps away, and Blinkfeed will be gone forever. Or until you put it back of course. Make sure you scroll over and tap the Blinkfeed page (not your homepage, or you’ll delete the entire thing) and then hit remove. Below you’ll see the green box is now around the Blinkfeed page rather than my homescreen, and a quick tap of remove gets rid of it. It’s that easy!

blink-remove

Alternatively users can also simply pinch with two fingers on any screen to get to the homepage apps and widgets “edit” screen. From here you can add new widgets and customize your device, but you’ll also be able to long press to grab the Blinkfeed homescreen and just slide it to the garbage. It’s gone. Same as above, just a different method. Whatever is easiest for you.

Screenshot_2014-06-12-14-19-03

As promised above, some users don’t want to completely remove HTC Blinkfeed as they love the in-your-face alerts and information at a glance, but would however like to disable it being their main homescreen. When you tap home you want to go to your main homescreen full of your favorite apps and such, not Blinkfeed, so lets do that as well.

Heading into the same exact menu as we discussed above (either by a pinch, or by long-pressing and selecting Home screen settings) you’ll see there’s an option for “Set as Home” to the left of the remove button we talked about earlier. So long press a blank area of the screen, select Home screen settings, tap your homescreen of choice so it’s highlighted (as shown below) and tap Set as Home. All done.

blink-home

That’s all there is to it. Pretty easy right? We have plenty of other HTC One M8 how to’s coming up quick, but in the meantime check out our 38 Tips, Tricks & Hidden features of this new smartphone.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Silvian

    06/13/2014 at 7:16 am

    I’m making $86 an hour work!ng from h0me. I was shocked when my neighbor told me he was averaging $95 but I see how it works now. I feel so much freedom now that I’m my own boss. This is the easiest and most comfortable w0rk I’ve ever done. Here’s what I do… DollarGazette.c*om

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