Agreed that Samsung bloatware and touchwiz are a bit too much for my liking. I got an S8 plus from Verizon because my previous Moto G5S Plus wasn't working properly on their network, despite them verifying that it would. So they gave me an S8 Plus for 150 bucks. The Moto phone felt just as snappy as the S8 does, despite having much lower specs because it was running almost pure Android.
However, the below method will disable whatever bloatware you choose for your user, without rooting the phone. It will still be installed on the phone, but disabling it for the user accomplishes basically the same thing, just doesn't free up memory space.
So I got all the Bixby nonsense, carrier apps, Amazon shopping, dictionary, Samsung email, etc. disabled. They never run in the background, never update and my battery life improved quite a bit as a result as well. The downside of this method is that you have to run the command for each app separately, it's not a one shot deal, so it takes some time. It's worth it IMO.
Remove bloatware
I'm now running Microsoft Launcher, yeah I know Microsoft on an Android phone, but I have tried Nova and others and I didn't like them and they affected battery life, not by much but I could notice and some have adds unless you purchase the app. Microsoft Launcher, on the other hand has no adds, it is free and so far I have not noticed any impact on battery life.
But just disabling the bloatware apps I didn't use made a nice improvement in my case, more so for battery life, the performance was always good because I don't have a ton of apps.
All of this can be done without the need of rooting the phone. Also, and it could be a plus or a minus, if the phone is restored to factory settings, all the disabled app will reappear again. Useful feature if you need warranty work, not useful if you need to restore for other reasons, because the process will have to be repeated again.
