Samsung, Oppo collared in smartphone bloatware probe Smartphone makers Samsung and Oppo face legal action in China over handsets apparently stuffed with bloatware. Plenty of folk in the People's Republic have moaned to regulators about pre-installed software on their phones, prompting Shanghai's Consumer Council to act. The country's Consumers' Association said in a statement …
I want my Android phone to be filled with largely useless applications.
I want a UI skin that adds little or nothing.
I want to wait longer (or in vain) for the release of the next version of Android because of the work involved in porting that software & UI.
Forcing people to root the phone seems a perfectly reasonable for the downright cussedness and lack of gratitude shown by some users who want to uninstall it.
I very definitely don't want a guarantee of Android updates being supported for a period of at least two years after the release of the phone.
You overestimate the bravery, desire and technical ability of the average phone user to rootkit their phone, especially while it is still under warranty. I've yet to see a genuine normal user useful reason to rootkit my phone along with no guarantee that it will not just result in new forms of bloatware and that all my current apps (the ones I want) will continue to work etc.
"You overestimate the bravery, desire and technical ability"
Nope, that was entirely my point. I'm also a coward and have no desire to risk borking my phone so have avoided rooting it. But I deeply resent not being able to just delete all that guff.
Please don't tell me I should have /sarc'd the op.
It's not providing a simple and documented way of removing them, and in such a way that the basic functionality of the phone is not harmed.
After all, there's a possibility that one or two of them might have some benefit for the user, rather than for the maker.
Don't want it? Buy a different phone, or no phone. That's consumer choice.
Dare I risk a car analogy? If I go to a Ford dealer and say can i have it without the CD radio or the silver trim down the side, they'll say we don't make them like that. Your welcome to try and peel them off yourself later of course.
Or perhaps its closer to an all inclusive holiday. If you want the swimming pool and free soft drinks and salad bar but don't want the experience-authentic-local-cultural-night, then the best you can hope for is to stay in your room with a pillow over your head.
"If I go to a Ford dealer and say can i have it without the CD radio or the silver trim"
Not been to buy a car recently have you?
Last time I did, there was a wide range of choice of options, some factory, some dealer at additional cost. All to be added to the bare bones model. Or I could buy one of their specials that had a whole bunch of special stuff in it already at a special price. To which I could add extras at my own expense if I wanted.
Given the prevalence of internets these days it would be relatively easy to provide a base version that then upgraded as per customer request as part of initial setup.
No AC. That argument won't hold water.
This isn't like having a car with an installed radio, to follow your image.
It's like having a car with a radio that
a.) comes preloaded with 200 Country and Western titles that are on permanent display, and
b.) that the radio can't be replaced without the risk that the entire car may never work again, but invalidates the warranty.
I bought the Galaxy Note 10.1 last year on sale and it came bundled with a lot of bloat -- Facebook, NY Times, and other junk. This tablet was not through a mobile phone company, it was purchased direct. And I could not uninstall or disable that bloat.
Cyanogenomod took care of that. No more bloat. I shouldn't have had to do that.
feel that a device (any device) should be supplied with the OS and basic apps only... Apps that are essential to getting full functionality from said device... It is the sole choice of the manufacturer what they install.... However, full disclosure of what the apps do, what data they collect and send and how to completely remove them should be mandatory.
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Do Note 3s sold in the US/UK actually ship with 44 bloatware apps, or is this just China? I knew there were a few, but I had no idea the problem was that bad. No wonder Android users consider a SD card slot to be mandatory - they don't have any internal storage left with all the undeleteable crap they're forced to take!
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1980s......
You only had two downvotes on your post about source code, over the last three hours
And since providing source code wouldn't either be of any use to most users or be reasonable to expect to be given the intellectual property that is source code I'm surprised there aren't many more.
I rarely downvote anyone's posts. Certainly not because I disagree with them, only if they're just plain clueless or trolling. If there is someone (or maybe three someones) following you around downvoting you, it isn't me, but I find it humorous you are so paranoid...
Sorry to spoil your sarcasm, but while Apple do include bloatware with their devices (thinking particularly of the Stocks and Apple Watch apps here), they include a lot less than most other companies, and also do not allow the mobile phone networks to include their own.
I still shudder when I think of the pink, white and grey colour scheme used by the dialer T mobile forced me to use on my old HTC tytn 2, and how long it took the f**king thing to respond when I dared use it to dial.
Even the Nokia N95 that replaced it rarely got updates as they had to be OK'd by the network before we could install them (which stopped happening once O2 had another phone to push).
That's a few of the things I like about my iPhone. I know that it's going to be supported for at least 2 years after release (my Nokia received updates for 1), and possibly more. I also know I will get those updates on the day Apple release them (no waiting for a network release that may never come) and I know that the network will not be allowed to install any bloatware on top of the minimal amount of bloatware already installed by Apple.
What does that have to do the carrier installing bloatware? T-Mobile is pushing some bleeding edge features that many carriers are not yet using, like VoLTE and wifi calling. Their customers may have hit something most of us can't use (and thus doesn't get well tested during beta phases)
There are also some "carrier settings" that get installed when you activate your phone on a given carrier's network. The bug might exist in there, though that's just a data file so it shouldn't be the source of the problem unless T-Mobile and/or Apple really screwed up validating the data.
Sorry to burst your bubble, unless you bought your phone off-plan then you're actually only leasing 'their' phone until your contract is up. Until then they can install whatever they like and you can stuff it if you don't like it. It doesn't belong to you. You could sell it before the end of your contract but you'd still be paying for 'their' phone out of your 40 quid per month phone tariff.
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