Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook
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When buying a new phone I always spend some time deleting all Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and carrier related apps. Yes, you can delete 'undeletable' apps through ADB, without rooting the device.
pm uninstall -k --user 0 <name of package>Right now, I restrict my selection to Android One [1] phones. The current one is a Nokia 8 Sirocco.
But for the first time in 15 years I think I might consider a Nokia next time I go shopping...
The new 7.1 with 64gb is not available at all here. Only through imports with an 110$ surcharge.
No idea about whatsapp though.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/jelly-the-sm...
I just want a good Android phone with at least some level of enhanced privacy. Its such a pity Copperhead went kinda weird.
[1] https://fossbytes.com/oneplus-spying-users-disable/And ancient = bad? Boy, do I have some bad news about power sockets you have at home.......
I want wireless headphones too, but I don't want to use adapters with my existing(and very expensive) headphones that I have right now. More importantly, having a headphone jack does not stop bluetooth headphones from working.
Also, direct updates from Google for 2 years without interference from the brand (Xiaomi in this case). Which means I have security updates every month.
I'm not going to buy anything that's not an AndroidOne from now on, with the exception of a Pixel.
You got exactly NONE updates from google. "Android One" has a requirement for vendors to provide updates. All those updates were from xiaomi.
MIUI is baked in and you need to register an account with Xaomi if you want to unlock your bootloader and put, say, LineageOS on your phone. Xaomi has a bootloader lockout period on their phones, during which you must wait and use MIUI for a period until your bootloader unlocks. They've increased that period from what was once a couple of weeks, to over a month on new models. That's plenty of time for Xaomi to harvest your data.
Meanwhile, there are other phones that allow you to unlock your bootloader without a data harvesting period.
Google aims to provide security updates to all Android devices, but specifically targets their product lines (Nexus, Pixel, etc) and Android One devices as they have a little more control over the software.
Is this basically considered stock Android? Or is that yet another tier?
It's actually a different phone than the non Android one version.
The biggest drawback is probably the camera which although not horrible is a few years behind recent flagship phones. Not everyone cares about having the latest greatest camera on their phone. The camera is perfectly fine for my Mom to send me a picture of the latest thing she saw at Costco for a great price which she thinks I need to get and that will account for 90% of photos taken with their phones.
Mid-range Android phones that are part of the Android One program have really started making it difficult to justify spending the money flagship Android phones are costing these days.
Once my phone will start acting up, it will be difficult to justify the expense for a flagship, when midranges are as good as they are.
I ended up getting an unlocked new LG V20 from eBay, which is a slightly older phone, but the most decent spec I could find with a replaceable battery. Been great so far, so it's been worth it for $190. Got a couple of spare LG batteries too, for $25 each.
Nice reminder about the ADB uninstall trick, as there's some AT&T stuff that would be nice to remove if possible. I'm also tempted by LineageOS, but need the core Google Android apps - so probably too suspicious to use a bundled install that someone else has put together.
I always wondered what to replace my Nexus 5 with, thanx for the info.
edit: just checked Ebay, and yup, there are no legit new copies to be had, except for maybe AT&T or unlocked variants for $400+. There's a very low chance that anyone will be/or has been able to find a new LG V20 for at least a year, and almost certainly not for a reasonable price.
It is a similar situation for numerous other smartphones on the used market, most new copies for sale are actually remanufactured/used that have been repackaged and fraudulently resold as new from somewhere [originally] in China. The fake LG V20 new copies began flooding the market somewhere in the past 1-2 years, and have dominated since, but that practice is typical for smartphones in general.
It's definitely intended for AT&T, but worked fine with Three in the UK as soon as I entered the appropriate APN info and restarted.
Here's a relisting, for what it's worth :
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/372561134735?ViewItem=&item=37256...
Like the packaging shown in that Ebay link is incorrect for an AT&T variant. AT&T almost never uses OEM packaging, instead they use some weird gimpy branded boxes of their own. If it didn't come in a box like this, then it was a fraudulently repackaged and was not new:
https://i.imgur.com/n2dFAq2.jpg
Also the printed inserts should have AT&T branding on them, and will include AT&T-specific inserts. The flood of fraudulent LG V20s usually include generic international versions of the printed inserts. Watch for the IMEI label on the box being pasted over with another label, to hide the ID numbers of the device the box originally came with.
Just because its not new doesn't mean it might not work fine, it just means you'll likely never get warranty coverage; or if you do get LG to accept it once they examine in-house for repair you're probably boned.
Anyone had similar issue?
If that's not bloatware then I don't know what is
Xiaomi puts a lot of crapware in their Android One mobiles. They have their own line of apps, "Mi", and they include many of them pre-installed by default.
There is however one I can't disable in my sony phone (what's new) and even if I've managed to completely silence it I'd like to try with this method. Maybe it can do it even if the UI doesn't want to :)
these uninstalled system applications can/will come back after a factory reset. This is a good thing, however, as it means that these applications truly aren’t being uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user (user 0 is the default/main user of the phone). That’s why, if you omit the “–user 0” and “-k” part of the command, the command won’t work. These two commands respectively specify that the system app will only be uninstalled for the current user (and not all users, which is something that requires root access) and that the cache/data of the system application will be preserved (which can’t be removed without root access). Therefore, even if you “uninstall” a system application using this method, you can still receive official OTA updates from your carrier or OEM. [0]
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
Alas, it's true.
The crapware bloat has infested the entire industry. Sometimes I just don't understand? Don't some of these Samsung phones cost hundreds of dollars? Why annoy people who've already paid you with the crapware?
From software companies like Google and facebook, to hardware behemoths like Samsung, the entire industry has become addicted to this stuff.
Why make money once when you can make it twice? Where's the incentive for businesses to give you what you want, when you can instead just take what they offer?
This is a symptom of short-term thinking in corporate leadership. Apple didn't become such a valuable brand by filling their products with third-party shit in exchange for a few bucks.
The same intransigence that serves them today also had them teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for the better part of a decade at one point.
Apple has that commitment to quality, but even aside from that commitment they also just have really good taste and its baked into their product design and company culture. As they say, money can't buy taste and there are no MBA programs that cultivate such sensibilities. It's a hard orientation to copy.
I still use that crap, unfortunately, but am looking for replacement for both mobile OS and smartphone (probably Fairphone with /e/ or LineageOS).
I mean, I don't use LinkedIn nor OneDrive, and I only occasionally use the others, but these are high-quality pieces of software, you can completely disable these apps natively as well, they're not removed, but they don't impact the system in any way aside from taking up a small chunk of your memory.
They shouldn't be installed in the first place. And LinkedIn isn't crapware, it's shitware
Is that pure android? Bloat? Crapware? Or just plain shit?
I really do agree with your criticism though. People worry about FB's privacy issues, but then totally overlook all of Google's builtin privacy issues.
And I am not sure what spyware apps you are referring to.
I called it bloat, not crapware. I did so because I don't use OneDrive, Excel etc, but my phone won't allow me to uninstall them via the conventional way. By my definition that's bloat.
How are you defining "small"‽
I have Excel installed myself and it shows as 438MB. Word is smaller at 265MB, OneDrive is surprisingly chunky compared to that at 110MB.
I've not got PowerPoint installed and Play store doesn't seem to currently display space requirements of non-installed apps (which I'm sure it previously did).
That might be small on your 128Mb+ device (IIRC the Note 9 doesn't come in smaller variants) but if they are getting pre-installed on 64 or 32Mb devices too, that is more than enough to be a significant issue for users who don't particularly have use for them at all but who do want to use their storage for music/photos/video/... instead of unused apps.
These apps sit in the system partition, which is read-only. If you root your phone, you can remount it read-write and remove them. However by doing so, integrity checks will fail. Also you won't be able to use that memory unless you repartition or put other apps there anyways.
The bad news is that if you update pre-installed apps, the original version will stay in the system partition doing nothing while you use the version you downloaded in the data partition.
It was a really big problem with early Android devices like the Nexus One (512 MB of storage).
Yes, especially LinkedIn. I do not want any software offered by or affiliated with LinkedIn installed on a device I own.
Roughly, I'd say that bloatware is anything preinstalled that's not filling a core use-case for the device, plus literally anything unremovable that isn't part of core functionality. So Messages isn't bloatware, but Messages+ and Samsung Health are. The first standard is sort of a fuzzy with general-purpose devices like computers and tablets, the second is pretty clearcut.
Crapware, to my mind, is "bloatware + shovelware". It's preinstalled stuff that's broken, malicious, redundant, or outside of standard use. Samsung Gallery is crappy, Superfish was malicious, VZ Navigator is basically a scam (paid, bad Google Maps), and the NFL app is worthless to a huge fraction of users.
The Office suite is very popular and highly functional, so I'd give it a pass if it could be uninstalled. Since it can't, it's bloatware. OneDrive is on the line; it's a popular complement to Office, but it's vendor-specific in a way that opening documents isn't. (Low-impact is not at all a defense; the 'disabled' state is nice for quick reinstalls, but there's no user-friendly argument for not allowing deletion.)
LinkedIn is absolutely crapware of the worst kind. It can't be uninstalled. It's irrelevant to a huge fraction of users (anyone who doesn't work). Its provided for the benefit of one company in a crowded space, whereas Office is a clear market leader. It's redundant functionality with a simple website, where Office is only partially duplicated by OpenOffice and Google Drive.
And worst of all? It actively hurts users. When LinkedIn lost its user data in 2012, the breach was made substantially worse because their iOs app scraped and uploader user data (including calendar info!) without permission. Permanently preinstalling an app that's largely useless and has already contributed to a major data breach is far outside what I consider acceptable behavior.
Thanks for the tip.
I don't know about the other application stores such as Samsung's 'Galaxy Apps' store, which is particularly intrusive. It is known for auto-installing apps even if you didn't ask for it. The best solution would be to delete Galaxy Apps store itself. Unless you use it voluntarily of course, but who does?
Also: I wrote that comment 6 years ago!
I'm old enough to remember when this was standard. Before smartphones almost all cellphones were bought through carriers and came pre-loaded with a bunch of carrier crapware (often unremovable). One of the best things about the first iPhone was that Apple retained control of the pre-installed apps and AT&T was not allowed to put a bunch of their own garbage on it. 12 years later the lack of crapware remains a key differentiator for iPhones. But what's most surprising is that in an industry where everyone seems keen to copy even Apple's worst ideas (no headphone jack, notches) only a few are copying some of their best.
Today's "Samsung crap" is tomorrow's "Brand-new Android feature that you need to enable Google tracking to use"
It was explained only zillion times, but I will try one more:
In android, you have storage in two partitions: /system and /data.
/system is read-only, this is where anything that is shipped with phone is stored. Outside of system updates, it is not being touched.
/data is, where user data, installed applications, configuration, etc. is stored.
To factory reset the phone, you just wipe the /data. No separate partition for factory reset is necessary, because /system due to its immutability doubles as one. Anything you configure/change/etc is stored on /data. If you disable any bundled app, whether through gui or adb, the info that you disabled it is written into /data.
Once you want to sell your phone on craiglist, you wipe /data and the buyer gets exactly the same software you originally got.
There is also secondary use of the immutability: android system is distributed as partition image, not as a file archive. That means, that the physical fs layout is same for all devices of the same SKU, can be signed (dm-verity), and then verified at boot, whether the filesystem was modified or not. This is being used for ensuring secure boot, and unsealing secrets in trusted environment.
And the issue here is pretty clearly that users have to resort to adb to disable these apps. Why does Android force this? There is no reason, it could easily be built into the Android GUI.
No, you can disable (not delete or uninstall) nondeletable (system) apps on Android without adb. adb also lets you “uninstall” them for a given user (but not from the device), which makes them less visible to the user than disabled apps, but it's not clear to me that it does anything substantively different, since neither disabled nor uninstalled-for-current-user apps run.
> Why does Android force this? There is no reason, it could easily be built into the Android GUI.
The only difference I am aware of between disabling through the GUI and uninstalling for a particular user with adb is that the former allows you to reenable through the UI if you later choose to, whereas the latter removes it from the All Apps list in Settings, making it invisible from the UI and impossible to enable.
Requiring the latter to require the user to use the same tool necessary to reverse the process makes it less likely that users will accidentally do something that the same user can't reverse if they change their mind.
You don't have to resort to ADB to disable these apps for the most part; You can do it in Settings. For some apps you cannot do that in GUI - for Settings itself, for example, so the users don't shoot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, some manufacturers abuse this and mark as undisable-able apps, that they shouldn't. Over ADB, they can't disable it, so it works for any app, including Settings.
It has apps that cannot be installed from the phone UI. Which kinda makes sense, since you don't want people randomly uninstalling, say, the app store, and then complaining that their phone is bricked. OTOH, someone who knows how to do this via adb can be presumed to know what they're doing.
I have heard the argument about being able to hide the apps, but it is not the same. This is the first android phone i have had where i didnt root it and install a new android version. Just got tired of that (lack of security updates). So i am stuck with crapware.
The real "problem" was nobody wanted to pay Microsoft for the privilege of having their crap preinstalled.
Source : I was part of a team whose app was getting primed up for a preload on WP8.
Not too bad. Can't say anything about their other phones, though.
(Prior to this phone I had a Samsung S6 and that thing was nightmarish with all the bloatware)
Luckily downloaded regularly through the play-store, so I could just immediately delete it afterwards. But it still seems there's deals going on there even if you don't buy the phone from your carrier and it's android one.
Google Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, Play Music, Play Movies, Play Games, Play Books, Duo, Google+, and YouTube could all be called as crapware since they aren't required for core phone functions (and upsell for-profit services).
I guess it is somewhat a discussion what we mean by "crapware." But I'd argue most reasonable definitions include at least some of Google's pre-installed apps.
I just deleted the built in Mail app from my iPhone and it worked fine.
The app is deleted, but the frameworks and system assets it relies on are not.
Also, these days, people consider photos, music, videos, email, and similar to be core phone functions; frankly, many people use them more often than they make phonecalls.
(Personally, I disable around half of those apps, along with Chrome.)
Yes, which is why I want full freedom to choose clients and apps that would be doing this on my phone.
iPhone preinstalls 42 apps, not all of which can be easily deleted: App Store, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Clock, Compass, Contacts, FaceTime, Files, Find My Friends, Find My iPhone, Game Center, Health, Home, iBooks, iCloud Drive, iMovie, iTunes Store, iTunes U, Keynote, Mail, Maps, Messages, Music, News, Notes, Numbers, Pages, Passbook, Phone, Photos, Podcasts, Reminders, Safari, Settings, Stocks, Tips, TV, Videos, Voice Memos, Wallet, Watch, Weather
Android comes with 29 preinstalled apps, and like iPhone some of them cannot be easily deleted: Android Pay, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Chrome, Clock, Contacts, Docs, Downloads, Drive, Duo, Gmail, Google, Google+, Keep, Maps, Messages, News & Weather, Phone, Photos, Play Books, Play Games, Play Movies & TV, Play Music, Play Store, Settings, Sheets, Slides, YouTube
Not getting at you personally here :) just... it's astonishing how quickly we've gotten used to the idea that you'll pay hundreds of dollars for a licence to use a device that you're not really in control of.
You see a lack of control over your own device. I see someone else managing my device for me so that I don't have to think about it.
You see the app store locking you in. I see it protecting me from malware and keeping me secure.
I know you're right and I should care more.
You can appreciate how nice it would be to just let someone else figure it all out and take care of it for you.
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." - Thoreau
But Samsung's flavour of Android is not that. You have to pay extra attention because you can't trust it not to trick you into something you don't want — “agreeing” to adverts or sending personal data. You're constantly batting away flies. It's user-hostile, not user-friendly.
This is why I prefer Fedora to Windows: the intent of the person managing my device for me is to make a useful tool (not to enhance my experience in association with select commercial partners), and this aligns with my goals.
Peace of mind is precisely why well-maintained free software is more user-friendly than consumer shovelware.
(My job involves testing a website. This week I used a Samsung Galaxy S5. Peel Remote™ has to be an extremely elaborate parody… right?)
If not, that seems potentially confusing for secondhand users. Some apps such as Phone and Photos cannot be removed in any way, but users may still be confused if other default apps are missing.
I need to clarify - I'm not an Apple hater, I own an iPhone, 2 iPads, 2 Macbook Pros and a Mac Mini at the time of this comment.
But, this same logic can be applied to Apple as well. For example, I don't use Apple's photos app at all. And I can't delete it. There is absolutely no way to even replace it. The same logic applies to Apple's crappy music app as well. I use Spotify 100% of the time. Not to mention the constant push to upgrade to Apple music on a system default app is unacceptable.
The photos app isn't crucial to my iPad's core functions. Yet I get constantly harassed with upgrade to iCloud bullshit constantly. Same thing goes with App Store as well, which has no way to turn off upgrade notifications. This is even true of Mac OS X as well, where I get notified constantly to upgrade to Mojave when I have no plans to do so...so that Apple can make my system slower and force me to upgrade my otherwise perfectly functional Mac. It's not like they haven't done this in the past, so...that's the real double standard I would argue.
I consider Photos and essential app to the phone. But the push to iCloud could be annoying (I haven’t experienced it because I already have it). If I remember correctly, android phones come with a Gallery App for Photos and then additionally Google Photos. This was a few years ago, I’m not sure if it has changed. Whereas iPhones come with Photos and the iCloud functionality built in.
I wonder if these articles would cease if Android simply changed the label "disable" to "delete" and removed the ability to view and re-enable disabled apps.
There are some built-in iOS apps that can't be deleted at all, such as Photos. For those that can be "deleted" Apple says users can restore them by downloading the app from the App Store.
But if a user deletes all the built-in apps that can be deleted, are they restored if the iOS device is reset? I would assume so, since wiping a phone is recommended before reselling it and a new user may be confused if default apps are missing, though I don't want to wipe my device just to confirm.
Yes, because if you take photos you kinda need a way to view them. It would be extremely confusing if your pictures you took with Camera ended up being saved somewhere but you could not view them, so Apple seems to have just made it a requirement.
> But if a user deletes all the built-in apps that can be deleted, are they restored if the iOS device is reset? I would assume so, since wiping a phone is recommended before reselling it and a new user may be confused if default apps are missing, though I don't want to wipe my device just to confirm.
That's a good question, and I don't want to wipe my device either. I'll see if I can get access to a "burner" iPhone to test this.
If deleted built-in apps aren't restored even after resetting an iOS 12 device, it's a good thing some apps aren't removable. I wish I'd thought to check before trading in my old iPad.
Yes.
This is no longer true since some version of iOS 11. Deleting apps removes them from your system, and you must redownload them from the App Store to get them back. However, while the application bundle might be removed from your device, the frameworks it relies on don't.
When you redownload a now-deleted-preloaded app, it actually downloads it. You can see the progression in the App Store. Which makes me think that Apple actually removes the App package from the phone.
So do I, but OS vendors are making that experience worse by 'integrating' it to some cloud bullshit whether I want it to or not.
My Galaxy S7 (with all the bloatware the article mentions) was replaced with an "Android One" device from Nokia. First thing I noticed on the Nokia was that the only gallery app was Google Photos, which I want nothing to do with.
The Galaxy S7 had Google Photos, but also Samsung's stock Gallery app, which I greatly preferred because it acts exactly like the dumb pipe I want it to. Same with Samsung Music. On the Nokia, I had to install an alternative app because Play Music is unusable with the constant nagging to join their streaming service.
It depends on the phone. On Pixel devices, which is arguably the closest on the Android side to Apple phones in terms of being curated, it's just Photos, plus the ability to swipe back in the camera app.
After the upgrade, I was suddenly required to sign into HomeKit with my Apple ID. What for? It was all working fine without it. None of my "smart" devices need a cloud connection to function. I prefer to not connect everything to the cloud when my home network works just fine for me. Since I refuse to sign in out of spite for this change, now I can't control things with Siri.
To me, crapware is:
- Order of magnitude bad engineering by industry standards (esp if it is not customer centric).
- So bad that if it could be removed, a majority of people who know how would remove it immediately.
- So bad that if [FANG / anyone competent at software] designed an alternative, most people would switch to it.
Crapware for me is not identically equivalent to mandatoryware. I get the GNU-like hate for mandatoryware from some people, but it's useful to have a distinction between (potentially subpar) mandatoryware like IE in Windows XP, and the absolute rubbish that was Verizon Music Store on my 2005 flip phone.
My Nexus5 had "HP Cloud Print". Undeletable.
Which was the reason I installed Cyanogenmod.
Not much of a phone without a phone app.
But Apple does sell an iPhone without a Phone app. It's called an iPod.
No, while it is an AOSP-derivative, it is not Android.
> Amazon Fire OS is an Android-based mobile operating system produced by Amazon ....
The A in AOSP stands for Android. Android Operating System
Guess you're splitting hairs and trying to say Android based isn't the same as saying Android.
I would argue that the AOSP is Android (and that's what Wikipedia confirms here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) )
You're getting it confused with Google Mobile Services which is the crapware in question.
> Android is also associated with a suite of proprietary software developed by Google, called Google Mobile Services[10] (GMS) that very frequently comes pre-installed in devices, which usually includes the Google Chrome web browser and Google Search and always includes core apps for services such as Gmail, as well as the application store and digital distribution platform Google Play, and associated development platform. These apps are licensed by manufacturers of Android devices certified under standards imposed by Google, but AOSP has been used as the basis of competing Android ecosystems, such as Amazon.com's Fire OS, which use their own equivalents to GMS.
I'm under no obligation to correct every error in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia> Amazon Fire OS is an Android-based mobile operating system
It's actually AOSP-based, more than Android-based (whether the relationship between the two is such that the former is a subset of the latter is...another discussion.) But even Android-based isn't Android (OS X is BSD-based, but not BSD; MariaDB is MySQL based, but not MySQL; the legal systems of much of the US are English Common Law-based, but not English Common Law)
Android devices, Android-compatible (per the ACP) devices, and devices running derivatives of the AOSP source code constitute a sequence in which each item describes a superset of the set described by the preceding item.
Clarification: this was not the apps; these were system hooks for sharing content through these services.
Thankfully Mac users don't have to put up with this kind of consumer-hostile bullshit.
Imagine a poor user, getting Apple computer with 128GB SSD, where 10GB or more is being taken by GarageBand or iMovie, which he isn't going to touch during the machine lifetime.
this is not surprising at all when you consider the ability to add crapware was a key differentiator for carriers of android relative to ios. ios threatened to disintermediate carriers out of phones, reducing the carriers’ value in the value chain. as iphones became popular, carriers glommed onto android to combat that threat. they continue to do so to keep apple at bay and maintain control over the phone.
Android itself and its integration with the Google ecosystem can also be considered malware or spyware ...
Apps that have no reason to have internet connectivity, like the dialer, clock app, the finder (search functionality within the stock launcher) are phoning home [!] Unfortunately Samsung phones have locked bootloaders, so there's no easy way to 'take control'.
[1] https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard
side note: I recommend installing this on all [un-rooted] android devices. It's an easy way to block most "telemetry" apps & devices collect, from the Amazon Firestick to apps running on any given device, including Google apps.
For the finder app, the index should be local. There is no way I want my apps, documents and file metadata to be sent to some samsung server to be indexed so that I can do a local search -- that would provide no value and it's also features that I've never asked for as a user.
The calls from most of these apps (especially samsung apps) to facebook servers also serve no purpose other than to try and datamine. I understand there may be cases where telemetry is valuable, but it's unacceptable to have apps (in many cases that haven't been opened) to try and connect to a remote server behind the scenes, especially when you cannot remove them easily.
The other examples are reasonable.
I don't understand how this is "problematic". I'm fine with Android being able to use NTP; I'm not fine with a clock app having internet access because it should just pull the time from the system.
- no upgrades - flat out horrible bugs that are never fixed - bloatware that you can't remove - shoving their apps down my throat.
Just about to buy a new TV and Samsung is explicitly excluded. Next phone won't be a Samsung either. I'm done.
For those of you wondering how to do it (I'm using Windows 10, but it's not that different):
1. Download Android platform tools for your platform: https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools...
2. Unzip it, open cmd and head to the unpacked folder.
3. Enable developer tools and USB debugging in your Android.
4. List packages avaiable:
adb shell pm list packages
adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.package.nameThe thing is, that back then it was quite easy to just ignore the tapes or floppies that we didn't care about.
TIL: adb shell has all sorts of goodies, so I went for the one-liner:
pm list packages com.facebook | sed 's/package://' | xargs -n 1 -- pm uninstall -k --user 0
Can I add another qualm in a similar vein? It involves Samsung TV's. I'm convinced Samsung is increasingly mean.
I only use streaming services (Netflix, et. al.), and for the past year I've been pretty pleased with "Smart TV" functionality, which makes life easy. That is, until the following happened. After a recent update, the TV:
* Now starts up automatically onto some broadcast TV station, I think it's some sports station. There is No Way to turn this off, because it's not an app, but a new functionality built into the TV. By "broadcast TV" I don't mean the old-school antenna or cable, I mean the equivalent of live broadcast TV streaming via the Internet. If I turn the TV off, for example, while the YouTube app is up, when it turns back on, I get that streaming broadcast crap again.
* The broadcast crap has commercials, and sound on.
* Ads have ALSO popped up in place of one of the "buttons" in the Apps menu.
You're not enraged yet? Let me save the best for last:
* When using the voice functionality on the remote during a search (either on YouTube or someplace), a popup jumped up telling me that I needed to accept THREE terms and conditions (three checkmarks), and click OK, or I could not use the voice functionality. The TOC involved aggregating my searches and data for ad purposes, and it said something about other Samsung devices. Luckily, I don't own any.
I went back to plugging my PC into the TV.
Folks, please do not buy any Samsung products.
> I went back to plugging my PC into the TV.
It's a perfect example of what Stallman has always warned us about -- companies using software in products to control and exploit us rather than empower us. All the things you mention, planned obsolescence, and more.
I’m not saying the Roku is perfect, it’s far from it (and I’d love to be able to give them feedback), but at least if they piss me off I can throw their device in the trash and replace it with an Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire, etc. and still have a perfectly well functioning 4K TV.
Installing pi-hole reveals how noisy a Roku is [2].
[1] - https://docs.roku.com/doc/userprivacypolicy/en-us [2] - https://imgur.com/a/n5zcAwl
Fortunately, my Apple TV 4K also has the relevant apps for the services available in my country, and neither LG nor any other manufacturer whose TV I may decide to purchase in future can gain any telemetry or force any workflow on it.
The dedicated Netflix and Amazon Prime buttons on my remote never get a look in.
The OS that runs on those things is such unmitigated shit, whether it's LG, Samsung, Vizio, anything. Just use it as a dumb display.
At least if I have an xbox one driving it I can be reasonably confident that microsoft has a highly vested interest in staying up to date on security patches. And whatever data collection I've opted into/out of has been vetted by people in Redmond. Use a home theatre PC to drive all other needs.
I have quite a list of apps that I’ve disabled but can’t uninstall: Chrome, Drive, Galaxy Apps, Gmail, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Play Music, Google Text-to-speech engine, Hancom Office Viewer, Launcher3, Memo, Photo Screensavers, S Planner, Samsung Billing, Samsung Push Service, TalkBack, Weather, YouTube. I’m going to try LeonM’s technique to see if I can in fact uninstall them without rooting the device (which I have failed to accomplish; it seems to me that you’re basically stuck if you don’t use a flagship device, and my Samsung J1 (2016) isn’t flagship).
Then there are plenty of others that I’d like to disable but can’t; including but not at all limited to: Email, Email, Email composer, Email storage, Email sync, Internet, S Planner, Samsung account, Samsung Cloud Data Relay.
Samsung is by far the worst at it. I won't buy their phones anymore.
So, unused button. Wish I could bind it to camera or something, no such luck.
The reddit thread about this story mentions an app "bxActions" that sees to be doing exactly that and might be worth a look: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ae265u/samsung_...
Yes, my Nexus One phone from 2010 had Facebook pre-installed.
To add insult to injury, it had a ridiculously small amount of flash storage, so I had to choose between using precious space or foregoing any security updates that might be in newer versions.
I've been using Android for a number of years now and between the handset manufacturers and the wireless providers, there has been undeletable crapware since the beginning. I've been slowly modifying my behavior in response. I stopped buying phones directly from the wireless providers (e.g. Verizon). This has noticeably improved my experience. Every time I upgrade my phone, I look into the Google flagship Android phones, but they always have some critical flaws that drive me to buy the Samsung Galaxy phones. The same thing happened a few months ago when I chose the Galaxy S9+ over the Pixel 3's. I also always think about switching to Apple iPhone, since I do think they take user experience and privacy more seriously than Google Android.
While I'm on the subject. Samsung, please get rid of Bixby and all of your crappy Samsung apps. I hate the feeling that there's two OS's loaded on my phone... the Android layer and the Samsung layer (which I never use but always get prompted for unless I figure out how to disable it).
Personally, I can live with this situation since I can always remove what I don't like with adb, and I quite enjoy a lot of the features and changes that Samsung added on top of stock Android.
That is not possible. They can either have only the google apps (great, just like ancient IE monopoly times) or "duplicate apps", but they can not omit the google apps if they want google play.
Also, preinstalls matter very much as can be clearly seen in the market share of IE, edge, chrome and safari.
Samsung, please don't. Even if they are not great, having some counter to google's monopoly position is sorely needed.
... but then couldn't they just ship their internet browser or chrome and not both? No, they can't due to google's oppressive contract, which is what the EU fine was about.
AFAIK, mobile Chrome still has the better dev-tools, but from an end-user perspective, being able to install plugins for your mobile browser (like ublock origin) without having to root the phone is a real competitive edge.
They aren't the best with updates, sadly.
Around 4-5 years ago, Android phone manufacturers started locking down their phones more while not letting them be rooted. They didn't solve the problem of having undeleteable apps waste my time & space with clear advertising plays.
After my experience with the Galaxy S5, I quickly jumped to the iPhone 6 when it came out, and haven't looked back. I've used Android for a period of time in parallel with a second phone, but it only confirmed my reasoning for bailing for the iPhone - the Android experience is just way behind.
The good news is that you can buy almost any Android phone off Amazon and with the exception of Samsung it is most likely bootloader unlockable. Motorola is especially good in this regard.
Android apps are a bit more free, that leads to a lot of apps being good at talking to each other. But the cost is that your sandbox is less sandboxy.
Permissions are a moot point when you're talking about bundled apps because they're already going to be approved for all permissions.
In other words, applications that do far more than the stub on Samsung phones, and not only could they not be deleted, but they couldn't be disabled either, so they always showed up in Settings. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/understanding-facebook-integrati...
> Android One is a series of smartphones that run the unmodified Android operating system. It is a hardware and software technical standard created by Google intended to provide a consistent user experience and improved security through frequent updates and Google Play Protect. Android One was launched in 2014 and focused on entry-level devices for emerging markets, but later evolved into Google's principal mobile program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One
I have an LG G7 One (the Android-One version of the LG G7), and I'm very pleased with it.
I'm using an Android One phone as well, but there's still a dozen or so of Google's apps that I would like to be able to remove.
I chose less bloatware as well, but let's not pretend that there's no bloatware in Android One.
Sorry, did you mean "low-end" here? Because the Pixel serves the high-end market quite well, I think.
E.g. I tried deleting Chrome from my mobile and I can't, I could only disable it. So crapware too? I'd say yes.
PS: read about "notifications" and remembered a funny story about Chrome. I was once given a Samsung phone to fix some AD notifications coming up regularly. And it was not obvious for some reason who was sending them. Apparently some apps can hijack default browser setting and force open their links in Chrome (which, again, isn't possible to remove), and Chrome by default allowed notifications from sites. After guessing this and opening Chrome I found out that there were several dozen open tabs, and some them were sending "useful" notifications. Default browser on that phone since buying the device was "Internet" app by Samsung. Same stuff, only without notifications, also happened on my own phone where Firefox is default. Until I force disabled Chrome some apps continued to hijack defaults and opened links in Chrome.
They avoid it because you can't install any apps (and F-Droid isn't a solution for most people). And without apps you might as well buy a legacy phone.
And it's not just facebook, it's an industry wide ( or even an economy wide problem ). It's everybody - google, microsoft and yes, even apple ( despite what their fans think ). And of course techcrunch and the rest of the media.
I guess I was wrong about the end of the anti-facebook clickbait media stories this year.
I found a paper written in 2010 for the Netherlands [1], claiming that : "Thus, web advertisements increase the total energy consumption of PCs by 3.4%."
That's not counting the cost of running the infrastructure, and I suspect ads and tracking probably did not evolve in the right (i.e. less energy hungry) way in the last 9 years.
As for the current consumption of power by 'client devices', it is estimated to consume 5% of total world electricity [2]
I could not find any number on the energy consumption on the other side, i.e. servers/infras.
As a (very) rough estimation, without taking into account the 'server' side of ads, we can estimate the energy cost of ads to represent ~0.17% of total energy produced in a year.
In the end, I stand corrected : the amount of energy consumed is far from negligible at that scale. However, while it is definitely not negligible on absolute terms, I think there are lower hanging fruits to focus on to fight global warming, such as reliance on fossil fuels, common use of products made on the other side of the world, meat consumption...
[1] : https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-hidden-energ... [2] : http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/12/11/tsunami-data-con...
My view is that adblocking is an environmental necessity. And paying business model should always be provided. As a footnote, they estimated that If Netflix switched to a video ad model, 42.02 TWh of added electricity would be consumed!
[1]:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...
The idea that interaction implies blanket consent is silly.
Probably still wouldn't dissuade most buyers, unfortunately.
I imagine advertising "Hey, User, remember that amazing Phone Model 1 you could buy for 600$? Now you can buy it with included spying software for your convenience, for the same amazing 600$ and we will earn 20 cents more from each deal! How cool is that, heh?! You want it too, right?!" :)
Like paying to go to a movie theater doesn't mean you can choose to skip the ads before the show.
TL;DR: Blocker extensions are easy but they can be compromised.
You could actually roll your own uBlock extension: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
then write a script that updates it in your browser. Is that safe enough? :)
Trying to keep the head space clean, and there is only so much time at my disposal with caring for a family.
So at the same time I got pissed about how much deps sites rely on, I discovered that there wasn't much to miss either. It's like dropping facebook, just a relief. To be fair I'm talking about news outlets mainly.
I was there when we had the BBS with dial-up modems. HTML was sweet, but it got quite boring when it faced reality. It's easy for people to share now, but just how easy can it be for people to care about what they share and how? (Like caring about how much tracking there is etc.)
My wife and I strongly disagree, she lives in the real world and actually like how well she can communicate and I'm just overwhelmed instead and care about the technicalities.
The jury's still out on the health effects of our digital culture. It's too strange and too young to really get clean long-term results on it. But I would be utterly floored if it was having no significant effect on our well-being and culture. There's probably some positive and some negative, but hey--cigarettes help aid digestion, after all.
I've written about it here before, but leaving the digital life completely for periods is easily the most healthiest things I've done.
All it means is that the app comes installed by being part of the ROM image. It can be disabled which is essentially the same as deleting it, except you don't get the space back (which is fine since it's the rom, you can't use it without reflashing anyway). Once disabled, the Facebook app won't be able to track you or be loaded into memory.
What this deal is really about is the Facebook app coming preinstalled on new Samsung phones. Bloatware: yes. But don't make too big a deal about the "undeletable" thing.
Don't know. I have the same question. "can FB track me even if the app is disabled?" How the hell do we know it's impossible?
I've noticed it for years and thought it was widely known. There are apps that will try to hit graph.facebook.com before they even connect to their own services. You can install a VPN based firewall to block this behavior.
Full Disclosure: I do still have Messenger Lite on my phone, but with notifications disabled so I only check it a couple of times per day.
Having said that, voice calls are simply more productive for quite a few things.
Making "must not interact via telephony" a condition of friendship seems a bit much. Is meeting in person also out of the question?
Unfortunately I still have messenger* because that's the way all my friends and kids communicate, but if there was another platform they were all on I'd delete my FB account tomorrow.
* Yes, i know what that all means in terms of 'sticking it to the man'!
The service evolved in such way (mainly the changes how posts are being displayed in the feed) it doesn't offer anything I couldn't live without or that would interest me.
We spend $1000/mnth on FB ads. They show millions of impressions and 20k link clicks. However only 2k visits are shown by both google analytics and Mixpanel on the actual website.
It really seems like an empire that will crumble some day.
While digging into some discrepancy issues, I realised our own tracker was picking up way less clicks than what FB alleged. Across all the cases (a handful at best) I was involved in, this appeared over and over. I remember going back to our internal FB team highlighting that.
Never heard back from them and had too much on my plate to bother with it. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that picked up on that.
It often happens to me that I click on ads on my phone accidentially, but click back before the page actually loads.
Worth pointing out that if you run say cloudflare and g analytics you get similar discrepancy numbers. (Also about 1:10 in my experience).
Read various theories on why - most focus on js tracking vs pure traffic.
There have been times I've loved it, but in the last year or two I've dialled back my usage to almost nothing. Now I get regular emails / (and when I log in a whole load of) red dot notifications - both things that used to be alerts about just _ME_ - that say things like "[friend name] just posted".
With an undeletable app, I wonder how far away we are from someone embedding Facebook notifications in the OS?
I was discussing that with a friend and sure enough, within the minute, a FB notification about adding some random dude popped up.
First thing I do when I upgrade my LG phone (I've had the LG G2, LG G5, and now the LG G7, I don't think it was preinstalled in the G2 but I can't be certain) is to disable Facebook and related uninstallable apps. If I bothered to root my phone I'd remove them as well. It's obnoxious that phone manufacturers include more than just vanilla Android, which is why I will likely get Nokia or Motorola for my next phone, they're usually unlocked and not riddled with crapware, funny how much cheaper they are too...
I've been an Android user since the original Samsung Galaxy, but to be honest my next phone will probably be an iPhone.
I switched to Google phones starting with Nexus 4, which at least has pre-installed apps I generally like and use.
I'm not sure I trust them either, unless this apparent backdoor situation has since been resolved? I'd rather stick to Nokia or Motorola.
https://www.wired.com/story/oneplus-phones-have-an-unfortuna...
I'm not sure how much I can trust them after that, though. They had a real chance to make a difference and they blew it.
Just make sure to break out of the jail.
pm uninstall -k --user 0 <name of package>
In fact it's mainly abusive monopolies that tend to receive this nonstop criticism. Ordinary crappy companies go out of business because people can switch to their alternatives, then no one complains about them anymore.
Did Facebook force OEMs to include their software on their devices? Isn't it more likely that OEMs are getting paid for the placement and the blame for its inclusion lies with OEMs?
It's about Facebook paying OEMs to force its shitty software down our throats.
IMO not really a meaningful distinction in this context though.
I'm fatigued by Facebook's existence.
Why such the laser focus on them specifically instead of on Silicon Valley giants in general? Why is the focus of the article on Facebook when they are not the only app that OEMs and carriers force onto their customers devices? What is the real reason that Facebook is being targeted?
Also weird how the article focuses on Samsung when it is an industry-wide issue with Android devices. It reads sort of like an Apple ad with a bonus anti-Facebook slant. To focus only on Facebook and Samsung for this issue is disingenuous on Bloomberg's part. The part quoting random Twitter users chiding Samsung is a poor choice for the article: its not just a Samsung problem and they know this. They acknowledge in the article that the issue is not just Facebook and Samsung, yet the focus is kept on them.
Fascinating!
Some months after unsubscribing from friend's posts email alerts, I changed my password to something I did not want to remember, only to be automatically re-subscribed, without notice, to their post updates.
Something is seriously wrong with IG. I'm a programmer, this is the sorta thing if I heard from someone else I wouldn't believe, but it's fundamentally broken imho.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/6emails...
It's under "Reminder Emails" which most people don't disable usually cause they don't think about disabling it.
I can't remember how to login to my FB account (and just don't care to try), so I just set up a spam filter to catch them and delete them. Within the first two months after I stopped logging in, I would receive 20+ e-mails a day from "friends I missed" or whatever. Now it's "only" about 3-5 a week according to spam.
And the messenger app is an incredible piece of junk, whoever did the ux with the chat heads should find a new line of work.
I mostly get frustrated by features breaking and then staying broken for months. I don't know how things like not being able to expand an image or play a video you've sent are slipping past testers.
Fascinating. I always wish other apps had the chat head feature as it's pretty much the only reason I still use the messenger app instead of Trillian.
The best solution is to simply configure a filter in your email client so those emails go to the trash directly.
This was a huge problem for my wife because her deactivated account got hacked and then myself and all of her friends and family started getting spam.
Anyhow, it’s handy to know it is there so thank you.
But I've been pondering from a zoomed-out, conspiracy-ish perspective. If FB merges with dating apps, I bet there will be no premium accounts at all, as revenue from them won't matter much. Because, having FB's stat-models of social groups combined with dating app leverage, they can be forced to gravitate towards or divided not only by superficial forces such as personalized news-feeds and ads, but your children potentially will become a content for you and the product for population, recycle.
The biological function of love is to reproduce as many DNA of yours as possible, or support closest neighborhood DNAs as well. It is interesting what it will be like when we'll have substituted natural love with statistically predicted one? We've been doing this already with politics and culture, only this time it will be more real-time.
"Swiping" has largely replaced computational matching because it outsources the decision to the user and allows for high-through-put decision making. Users set a radius and judge everyone who meets their basic criteria in that radius (or for the lucky, select from the cattle-call of already received likes).
Yes, these apps could be limiting the raw number of swipe opportunities, but this would probably just turn users away altogether for lack of viable matches that fit their criteria.
(Some of these phones do come with ad/spy/malware, but since they're easily rootable, it's not hard to remove. One could say the relative lack of security means the user is on an equal footing with the crapware authors and the manufacturer, whereas locked-down devices from companies like Samsung trade off user-control for company-control.)
The difference is that Apple makes the operation appear to be the same as deleting them and that's a good thing from a UI perspective. Clearly the "disable" option in Android is too confusing for some people.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
What Apple and the iPhone have demonstrated over the last few years is that they really care about their user's privacy and control over their apps.
This does not seem to be true for Google and Android.
People were annoyed that they had to install "obvious" apps for their Essential that every other manufacturer forcibly included.
I mean, yeah, but what about the device makers? It's not like FB can force them to do this..
I thought I'm a happy camper, when Nokia reissued the 8110. Ahh, no Google spyware, no Apple extorcionist paricing.
How wrong I was.
First of all it comes with Google Maps and Google Assistant. Then after the first software update it puts in Twitter and three crappy games, which full versions need to be bought and which cannot be removed.
Their privacy statement is also noo what I would call encouraging.
Do I really need to shell out for an IPhone after all?
Curious to see what you can hack with their devices on that FirefoxOS fork. Hmmm. Need to get me one of those phones, so cool looking anyway.
https://infinity0.github.io/droid-hacks/ for more technical tips, half-finished and badly-written.
It might increase the perceived value of a company to retain some users, but in the long term such tactics are damaging the company reputation, thus effectively diminishing the value of the company/product.
But in the matrix of needs, in such a possible future system, as if it weren’t already kind of like that. Within such a possible future system, the only command or need that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just shut it down.
http://rickroderick.org/108-philosophy-and-post-modern-cultu...
No “normal human” is ever going to install their own OS on anything. At least Apple enforces some standards...
Good, nevertheless all my friends jailbroke their iPhones to install apps not available in the store.
> No “normal human” is ever going to install their own OS on anything.
Whoever cares about having at least minimal degree of privacy will at least get root access, remove bloatware and install tools like droidwall and xprivacy on their android phones.
I applaud you for having friends who are so technically literate.
I think you would do well to remember the rest of the human race though.
On top of that, not everybody has a CS degree to read and go through source code of these custom firmware to make sure they aren’t doing anything funny.
One of things they are proposing is stopping likes of Google from being a default search engine in Australian devices. In that consumers will be offered a choice rather than provided one as default.
I would really like to see this extend through to bloatware applications where possible such as the myriad of random Microsoft apps that get installed, as well as the Google suite in non-Google devices.
I should be able to remove the applications that are on my device and use the applications only I want to. If I use Spotify for music, then I should be able to remove Google Music and Samsung Music. In the same way that I can remove Apple music and use Spotify on my iPhone.
Would people prefer that you could "remove" apps even if that meant they were still part of what's stored on the phone?
If you factory reset the phone, people expect it to look like whatever it looked like whenever you first started the device after taking it out of the box.
That's why you can't uninstall it; it's part of the system image. If there's an issue with how this work, the issue is that there are bundled apps, not that you can't uninstall them.
* End user management of trusted keys
* Keep most major manufacturer keys pre-loaded (even if disabled for current use)
* Factory reset online, not from device contents.
The downloaded bootstrap should, ideally, validate and re-configure the flash layout, possibly update system firmware if desirable, then apply the current version (or maybe offer a choice of back versions if applicable) of the 'factory' image for the device.
This way updates to the core image can be shipped with factory resets instead of some fossilized version of the software that should never be used for security or incompatibility reasons.
The above also applies to how generic computers should work, I understand that Apple devices are fairly close to this obvious process but I believe (offhand) that they lack end-user empowerment / management of authorized authorities at a bios level.
I took a second look while writing this comment and there's an addtional "Facebook services" app, which I've just gone ahead and disabled. Maybe that will stop the requests.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8. I like it. I took all the undeletable apps and removed them from my home screen. I hardly notice they are there. You can also shut down their permissions in the settings menu. They are basically inert.
And actually since back then Facebook apps have become easier to disable on most Android phones. Used to be that you couldn't delete them nor disable them on most phones. Nowadays is usually possible to disable the apps, and they are usually just stubs, so their impact is minimal to null.
Still would rather not that have them shipped, but when it comes to bloatware I'd say Google was a much bigger culprit.
2023: iPhone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't logout from Facebook
2025: Google Phone Users Perturbed to Find Their photos are automatically posted on Facebook
2027: Facebook Branded Phone Users Perturbed to Find Their life is cached 24/7 and automatically posted on Facebook
>Since Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 announcement that the Facebook algorithm will prioritize “meaningful interactions” from friends and family over content from brands, it has become trickier than ever to ensure your organic content gets the screen time it deserves.
[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-...
Right, editors from different media publications are "coordinating." They are actively strategizing and communicating with one another in order to "destroy" one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Because there's zero possibility that given involvement of FB in everything from violence in Myanmar, Philippines and Sri Lank to fake political ads in US elections, FB's further encroachment on our lives is an actual topical interest story? Yes "quite strange."
I think the 2016 presidential election has a lot more to do with the increased scrutiny. It brought both the media's direct attention and motivated many insiders to make public criticisms of Facebook, which fuels coverage.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-embeds-russia-and-the-...
And even before that back in 2012 the Atlantic did a piece on the emerging role of FB in politics entitled:
"Did Facebook Give Democrats the Upper Hand?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/did-f...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-campaign...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/14/obama-digital-...
Maybe reread your own comment above where you stated the concern of "increased scrutiny" and not criticality.
The link is evidence of of increased media scrutiny. From seven years ago no less. Specifically it discusses FB's emerging place as a political channel. Scrutiny and criticality are orthogonal concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
Of course such practices don't mean there's some kind of organized conspiracy, but it could plausibly explain why the news cycle is flooded with derivative material and many headlines share the same keywords. Here are a variety of outlets using the same unusual adjective "Dark" in non-editorial news headlines covering the same event:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/21/fu...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trumps-da...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004545647/tr...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-trump-...
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/07/22/a_dark...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/donald-trump-rnc-spe...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/22/donald-trump-pai...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/melania-trump...
https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trumps-angry-dark-s...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-gop-convention-spe...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/07/stephen-milller-...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/21/republican-convention...
Users can make video posts that others can comment on and share. Youtube also has rolled out Stories, which is similar to Instagram and Snapchat.
That said, Youtube does have many of the same social problems as Facebook (e.g. use as a cheap and effective channel for pushing disinformation, cultivating hyperpartisan filter bubbles, etc.).
No need to couch this as a hypothetical - wall-to-wall coverage of Ebola (and later, Zika) did while "ignoring" higher number of deaths caused by falling in the shower. Again, it wasn't a conspiracy, it's just that the news-cycle has positive feedback loops between newsrooms and the public- certain topics become more popular because they are popular.
Edit: replaced the flu with shower deaths. I couldn't find number for flu deaths for the period.