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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> The reason why I bought a Pixel from Google directly is because I do not like the adware and bloatware that comes pre-installed on phones from other carriers.

Bloatware mandated by google on all android phones:

1. Google+

2. Google Duo

3. Google hangout

4. Gmail

5. Google play music

6. Google play games

7. Google play movies

8. Google play newsstand

9. Google drive

10. Google sheets

11. Google chrome

12. Google maps

13. Google assistant

14. Google app

15. Google photos

16. Youtube

Seems like the author made a decision diametrically opposite to his desire. I literally use 4 of these 16 pre-installed apps. Keep in mind that these are non-removable too. You can disable them, but they will forever sit in the flash storage you paid for.

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It's surreal to me that Microsoft faced years of legal repercussions worldwide for including a browser in their OS.

Microsoft had a monopoly. Google does not.

So both Apple and Google control the market, and each uses the "not a monopoly" excuse because of the other company.

There's no practical difference.

Many (or most?) bundled iOS apps can be removed https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204221

> Removing built-in iOS apps doesn't free up storage space on your device.

So it does the same as disabling them on Android.

The linked article was for iOS 10. iOS 11 deletes the apps properly: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094

Hate to burst the bubble for you but Android has had this feature for a long, long time. I remember doing this on Android 4.3.

There is a huge practical difference and that is where their revenue comes from.

The key difference is the OEM license agreements. Google includes dubious requirements in their licensing terms, such as the anti-fragmentation clause. But Apple does not license their software to OEMs, and so cannot run afoul of antitrust IP licensing issues.

They have a duopoly [1]. The linked article explains what a duopoly is, and cites relevant examples. I can tell you of another very relevant US-centric example but its not in business: Republican and democrat.

The impact a duopoly has on a market is vastly different from a monopoly. One problem could be price fixing; but that could happen with more than 2 companies as well. Then we speak of a cartel.

The problem with a monopoly isn't per se that it exists; it becomes anti competitive business practices when the monopoly is abused to exercise control over other markets. I'd like to compare it with a benign tumor which ends up spreading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly

There is one difference: that’d be a Duopoly, not a Monopoly.

The EU is investigating Google over this right now. The hammer is coming. Margrethe Vestager (EU Competition Commissioner) isn't playing around.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm

Google will gladly pay the fine. Imagine the billions generated from search alone on Android.

You can have a monopoly. What you cannot do is to abuse it. Microsoft was punished for abusing its monopoly position, not for having one.

Microsoft caught flack not merely for including IE, but also for requiring OEMs like Dell to set IE as the default browser. Google deserves the same flack for e.g. their requirement that OEMs set Google Search as the default search engine.

AOSP does not include all these apps. Google says if you want to install play store on your device, you must also install all these apps. I think it's exactly the same as Microsoft's behavior with IE.

The silliest part of this is that Google phones specifically do not have removable storage so you're forced to use a cloud service, most likely Google's, for extra storage. Before the removal of the headphone jack this was one of my main reasons for avoiding the Nexus/Pixel line.

Do you really need a SD card when your phone has 64 or 128gb? That's so much space for stuff

Well the phone manufacturers are the ones advertising things like 4k video recording.

Are we blaming phone manufacturers for putting new technologies in phones now?

Also to be honest at least on android phones you can use various solutions, like plugging into your pc. On iPhone you’re essentially stuck with iCloud or iTunes.

No, the above comment is specifically referring to the idea that 64 GB or 128 GB is enough when a heavily advertised and useful function of modern phones is 4k video, which uses a lot of space, making 64 GB/128 GB last not nearly as long. It's not blaming them for anything, just stating that internal only memory when modern features easily use more space than is included may not be sufficient.

> at least on android phones you can use various solutions, like plugging into your pc. On iPhone you’re essentially stuck with iCloud or iTunes.

I know what you're hinting at (taking a stab at iTunes), but this is still the same thing. You plug the phone into a computer and offload the data, with the difference being the required software.

There's also a wonderful open-source command-line suite for intefacing with iOS devices: http://www.libimobiledevice.org

The idevicebackup2 command lets you do encrypted backups and restores.

The ifuse command lets you mount the iPhone as a fuse fs, which is super super handy because the photo folder names are APPLE100,APPLE101,etc and don't change, unlike the folder names that get generated when you plug in the iPhone normally :)

Really great software, made backing up my stuff a breeze.

There was once a time when the iPod was still a thing where I could carry around my entire music collection that was larger than that. Now that space needs to be shared with pictures, bloated apps, and video. 128gb is not much space at all if you actually try to use it and don't want to waste your time playing inventory manager.

A handful of games, a few video recordings and a reasonable chunk of music so you don't continually have to curate your own listening - and bam - it's gone.

I want my SD card slot (I also want removable batteries again but apparently I'm not allowed those either. Thank god for fast charging)

I have 64 GB with the internal storage + the SD card and I constantly have "no space left on device" popups. It's surprising how fast you can fill that with the music and the photos and videos.

Maybe not with 128GB of internal storage, but I carry around 60GB of music on my microSD card as well as many other file types.

It might seem like that now but if you're travelling and don't have internet access or you live in an area with poor cell reception, storage starts to look extra important.

Plus, it might be a lot now but how about in 5-10 years? Sure most people will have upgraded their phones in that time but it'd be nice not to have to.

You can also use an OTG flash drive (or a regular flash drive with an OTG cable).

> do not have removable storage so you're forced to use a cloud service

Photos are probably non-issue. There are many options - I basically feel that almost every single app that has anything to do with sync or storage offers to upload photos. That is, including many self-hosted options or cloud storage that promises client-side encryption with keys not known to the service.

What I haven't found is alternative backup transport. There is Google's default one (com.google.android.backup) that sends everything to Google Drive (no encryption!), local debug transport (com.android.internal.backup) that just dumps data locally and... as far as I know, nothing else.

The following apps are not included, or are optional during setup and uninstallable afterwards, on my Pixel 2 XL:

1. Google+

2. Google Duo

3. Google Hangouts

4. Google Play Games

5. Google Play Newsstand

6. Google Sheets

7. Google Assistant

I remember it changed at some point. On my ancient Moto G I can't remove Games, Google+, Newsstand, or Hangouts for example. I don't have Duo or Assistant installed and have others like Books and Movies & TV that I can't remove. I use Sheets all the time, it's the only one of that list I'd keep. And checking, I actually had to install that one manually.

I don't think this is accurate, I have an android phone and I had to download a lot of these manually

I've tried to not include apps that have to be manually installed, eg, Allo. But do you think I've included any of those here? Which ones? I remember having to disable all these as soon as I bought my phone.

>You can disable them, but they will forever sit in the flash storage you paid for.

That's true, but preinstalled apps sit on the /system partition, which is a separate partition from where your data is stored. The size is fixed so having it there or not doesn't affect how much data you can store.

To be fair to the author, the only other option (iPhone) doesn't even let you disable the bloatware or replace it with better alternatives. Recent Android phones (including the author's) install most of the bloatware from the Play Store on first use instead of storing them in the system partition with the OS, so you actually can remove them.

You can "delete" many default apps on recent versions of iOS. (It doesn't actually delete them, it just hides them — the same as disabling an app on Android).

Try doing that and then opening a location through iMessage.

The removed apps are deleted, not just hidden.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094

I don't think that document is entirely accurate. The apps "re-download" immediately, suggesting (to me at least) that they are still on-disk, somewhere. I believe that they delete associated user-data, though.

EDIT: Apparently things are different in iOS 11? Huh. TIL — will have to try it out!

That’s not true anymore. Since iOS 10 you’ve been able to remove most of the built in Apple apps.

https://www.imore.com/how-delete-apple-apps-ios-10

"One note on removing pre-installed apps: Don't do this if you need to free up some storage space on your iPhone or iPad. Because stock apps are part of the system bundle — some of them are deeply integrated with Siri, in fact — when you delete them, they aren't actually removed — they're just being hidden from the home screen."

Notably missing from the list of disableable apps: Safari and (for the author) Photos.

to be fair, they actually delete them in iOS 11

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094

Safari can be hidden via Restrictions.

> I literally use 4 of these 16 pre-installed apps.

Someone at Google HQ is thinking: "It works as intended".

1) You can disable and remove them. If you do not use them, and plan on not using them, do disable them. Example: I use Firefox, not Chrome. I don't have Chrome installed (I do have Webview installed, obviously). Example: I use Spotify, not Google Play Music. I disabled that instead.

2) You can install Android without GApps (and even with microG). For example LineageOS. You can even decide to use minimal GApps such as the nano variant.

Can you uninstall them without flashing your phone?

Yes, but not everything. Everything mentioned in the list of GP, yes. However something like GCM or Google Play, no. That's why you decide when you're flashing say LineageOS whether you want GApps yes or no.

I'd also like to note that disabling them does save up space. Not sure its all completely removed though. From memory, it reverts to an old version which was bundled with that Android version. On old phones, such space can be vital. Especially if you don't have microSD or pref not to use it.

This list is absolutely incorrect.

I have a 5X. Of all those, only the Google App is not removable.

google now feed

I had the very problem yesterday evening, so in case you did not figure it out:

To disable the Google feed if the disable toggle disappeared just clear the App data of the Google app to make it reappear.

To disable the Google feed if the disable toggle is present but has no effect anymore you can log out of the Google app by deselecting your Google account in the "search" settings menu.

I'd spend hundreds to avoid any kind of feed in my os.

It doesn't work for me. It is so frustrating. I live in Catalonia (Spain) and politics has been so intense here these last months that I want the right to disconnect from politics, but I can't, because I can't disable the news cards in Google Now.

Both methods did not work? Not even the deselecting of your Google account in search -> accounts & privacy?

That was the nuclear option in my case. It only affects search. Good luck.

It almost feels like satire; he trusts one of the world's largest advertisers to not advertise to him?

Why blame the user?

If there's a cliff, and the area has warning signs saying "cliff ahead, if you go ahead you will fall off and die." And if someone walks over the cliff, why wouldn't you blame the user?

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