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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Software is key and one of the selling point of Google made phones, like the Nexus 4, was the promise of a lightweight android installation with minimal apps. On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates [1]. Add the fact that the really cool new Android features, e.g. Google Now, are poorly supported outside the US, and I'm not sure my next phone will be a Google phone.

[1] Current list of these unremovable apps on my Nexus 4: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Cloud Print, E-mail, Google Now, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Indic Keyboard, Google Keep, Google News & Weather, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies, Google Play Music, Google Play Games, Google Play News kiosk, Google street view, Google talkback, Google text to speech, Google+, Hangouts, Google Wifi connectivity, Youtube.

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> On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates

While I don't think you can properly "uninstall" Google+ and Hangouts, you can "disable" them, which makes them inaccessible. I don't think you get updates pushed for disabled apps, either.

You don't, and it also offers to uninstall updates when disabling built in apps.

It also stops their services, and whatnot. It wastes room inside of the ROM partition, but not inside of the user data partition.

May be for Nexus 4, but I can uninstall those Google apps from my Nexus 5x, just tested.

When you install, are the apps completely deleted or just reverted to their default installation?

They get removed, not soft-uninstall. Moreover, those apps (docs, spreadsheet etc) were not present initially, I had to install from play store. The fact that, Samsung/LG won't let you uninstall (only disable) their crap-wares is the main reason I stick to stock Android.

Can you uninstall Google Play Games, Google Play Movies & TV or Google Play Music? I have a Nexus 5X running Android 7.0, and it appears these can only be disabled, not uninstalled.

Yup, Play* can't be uninstalled.

I don't really begrudge them for not allowing the store application to be removed. I can't imagine the number of customer headaches that would exist because of accidental uninstallation.

I run copperheados and have completely removed google from my phone.

I'm kind of looking forward to and also kind of dreading doing the same thing (flashing Copperhead) on my 6P. I have traditionally just disabled all the Google apps from the stock ROM while retaining Google Play Services for the Play Store and push notifications. Not sure how easily I will adapt to not having either of those things on a truly Google-free phone.

I'll also be abandoning several paid apps that I've bought over the years that are only available on the Play Store. It's going to be hard extricating myself from that ecosystem.

@saiko-chriskun Please provide some details of your experience with Copperhead. We are curious to know...

I mean there's the occasional annoyance of not having the play store but been a great experience otherwise.

Just root your phone? It's not rocket science for us techies.

I'm running a rooted phone at the moment but you're essentially reducing the security of the phone. I wish I didn't have to root my phone to get all the features I want (removing apps, backing up apps to somewhere I control, redirecting audio)

I'm a fellow rooter also concerned about device security. I think full disk encryption, with the unlock key encrypted with a passphrase not stored on the device gives me more than the security that was lost by rooting my phone. Even recovery can't touch the OS or my files without me feeding it the passphrase.

Nexus phones have never been about about an "lightweight Android installation or minimal apps" but no crappy heavy skins (TouchWiz) and no 3rd party or carrier apps.

Your point is still valid, but I think you can at least disable the built-in apps. This way the won't require updates and will not clutter your apps list. They still take up space on the internal storage though.

The Pixel phone also reserves a copy of the system partition, so you can update faster (all those 2 times per year that a big update happens), so double the bloat.

Two times per year? There is an update every month, even if it's just a security update.

Big update, the one which actually takes a long time. Still having less usable userspace for those couple minutes saved is insane.

It's not just about saved minutes. It's also a much safer update mechanism, and it's what is used by a lot of enterprise level network equipment. It allows easy rollback if there's any sort of problem. So it's not just quicker updates, it's quicker, safer updates.

Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE. Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).

> Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE.

That seems a little short sighted. You seem to assume the only way an update can fail is in because of a software bug, and it's just a matter of not enough testing. If the phone loses power for some reason, or one of the hardware components is misbehaving, I would rather it not brick my phone. This is the industry standard, because shit happens, and CYA is a good thing.

> Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).

Buying what? I'm not selling you anything. Is there somewhere I tried to convince you it was ultimately the best solution? I simply explained it had an additional (likely primary) purpose that you were not accounting for.

Security patches prior to N also required recompiling all apps, which takes more than "a couple minutes" for nearly everyone. This, along with not being able to adequately control when & how updates are downloaded & installed, has always been a major pain point. Imho, the new method is a huge improvement in both user friendliness and stability/safety.

That is an amazing feature that benefits everyone, you really want your users to keep updated for security reasons and guess what happens once users can no longer update due to a lack of free space? Apple ran into this because they insisted on selling 16GB models well past the time that was not enough space. I applaud Google for making the hard choice of less free space, but more timely updates.

Android correctly gets a lot of flack for having a fragmented user base which makes it a security and developing nightmare, if this feature were to become standard it would help everyone.

It should also be noted that they are giving away unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos which makes leaving some free space for updates a lot less painful. You probably won't fill your phone with app binaries, it's the photos and videos that take up lots of space.

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