Brave contains some features that may be undesirable for many people. I looked for ways to manually disable as much as I could, especially on Android (where screen space is at a premium), since the overflow menu takes up more than the entire height of my phone’s display. This is what I found.
Brave Wallet
This disables the “Wallet” option in the overflow menu, and the “Brave Wallet” item in the Settings screen.
- Navigate to the hidden Flags page: chrome://flags/#native-brave-wallet
- Switch “Enable Brave Wallet” to “Disabled”
Leo, Brave AI Chat
This disables the “Leo” option in the overflow menu, and the “Leo” item in the Settings screen.
- Navigate to the hidden Flags page: chrome://flags/#brave-ai-chat
- Switch “Brave AI Chat” to “Disabled.”
Cannot be Disabled (yet)
- Brave Rewards
- Brave News
- Brave VPN
It’s possible to use group policies to disable many of these features on desktop OS, but it doesn’t appear possible on Android yet:
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039248271-Group-Policy
The one I don’t see on there is Brave News, so we can open an issue for that. Here’s the issue to track this for Android: Android group policies · Issue #40651 · brave/brave-browser · GitHub. If you want to take on the Android issue tag me on GitHub there and I’ll make sure the right people take a look at it and can assign you to the issue.
Isn’t Brave fully open-sourced? From their UI elements to shields. ig everything is open-sourced (I haven’t personally reviewed their license or source tho)why doesn’t someone just build it from source and remove all the bloat?
Before Brave Rewards & VPN can be disabled using flags but Brave removed those flags
Are there any other flags that need to be disabled?
Is it possible to block these elements with a pi-hole?
I don’t think I have the ability, but that’s really good to hear. I hope that means, fingers crossed, that the current flags in Android are intentionally meant to remain there
While the browser code is open source there are a number of services that either Brave pay to use or pay to maintain, and which require API keys or values that are not stored in the source code.
Somebody wanting to build Brave from source would have to provide their own API keys and endpoints to enable these features, otherwise they would have a browser with many non-functional components.
Somebody probably could, but nobody has… And there could be pushback from Brave about people syncing their stuff to an unsupported browser.
The source code is also maintained centrally by Brave, so it would be good if they could at least say they’d accept a pull request for it if somebody figured out how to do that.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^aaryan45:
Before Brave Rewards,
VPN can be disabled but
Brave removed it from flags
^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Depends on your needs. The Flags interface has a search feature so you’ve got the opportunity to explore, at least.
The visual elements are built into the app itself, it’s not part of any webpage.
They should remain and even still there’s alternative methods like the group policy to turn these things off since some enterprises don’t like some of these features available (like TOR) on their network.
Ultimately, we try our best to make the features useful and spend a lot of time and effort to make them as private as possible. However, we’re fully aware that some users don’t like these features so the best alternative is to allow users to disable them so we can remain as “user first” as possible.
Yes, but maybe their traffic can be switches off.
I’m not too worried about any of these features sending extra traffic if they remain disabled (and haven’t seen any evidence of them misbehaving). And the remaining ones are disabled by default anyhow 
