> Even if it was remounted read-only to be deleted it wouldn't free up any usable space. This was somewhat annoying on my old phone, where out of the measly 16

> Even if it was remounted read-only to be deleted it wouldn't free up any usable space. This was somewhat annoying on my old phone, where out of the measly 16 GB of total space available, several hundreds of MBs were reserved for the OEM partition and therefore more or less completely wasted. The one semi-useful app therein was a file explorer app – given that at least at that time Android didn't really have a proper built-in file explorer, this was actually a somewhat sensible idea, but then on the other hand as a power user I still prefer a file explorer of my own choosing (and with root support), so it was still mostly useless to me. Other than that, it contained what looked like configuration apps for a few American mobile service providers, plus something like some sort of Brazil-specific app store – all completely and utterly useless, especially given that my phone was bought in Europe and was on the European software update channel! And as you say, deleting any of those apps wouldn't really free up any space (except a little bit in dalvik-cache if I remember correctly) because it was a separate partition.