Comment by farisjarrah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by farisjarrah | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I disagree, Google and Motorola branded phones most certainly DO come with bloatware. The Google app is not necessary for the phone's functionality(this is, if you don't use google assistant) and I can not uninstall it from my Pixel 2. This is true for many Google apps that Google would have you believe is necessary for the functionality of the phone. These are all the google apps that came preinstalled on my phone that I can't uninstall normally that are absolutely non-essential to have on a phone:

Google Chrome( I use firefox)

Google Drive (Fastmail)

Google App (I can use Firefox as a search provider on android)

Google Play Movies and TV

Google Play Music

Google Play Services for AR

Google VR Services

Playground

Youtube (Frankly, with the amount of advertisements on Youtube these days, Firefox on android with ublock origin installed is a few better user experience then the actual YouTube app for android)

These are just the apps that I personally have disabled, I am a fastmail user, so Gmail is getting disabled soon as well as Google Calendar.

Even Google's "stock" Android on the Pixel phones has plently of blaotware. LineageOS has much less bloatware.

That's your opinion, but most users want a phone that comes with reasonable apps that makes it easy for them to do what they want. I hope you see this is not black and white, there is a grey area here where apps are bloatware for some people but legitimate useful for some people.

To take Chrome for example, for Google to ship an Android phone without what they consider the best browser for the platform would be borderline insane.

I don't know why you're downvoted. If I, as an average consumer, bought a phone that didn't come with a browser, maps and music software, I'd think there was something wrong with it and would return it.

There may be an argument to make about allowing the user to pick their browser during onboarding, but calling the browser "bloatware" is completely ridiculous. You may not want Chrome, but 99% of people buying a Pixel are perfectly happy with having it bundled, so by definition, it's not bloatware. You can't just redefine "bloatware" to be apps you don't like.

But that is the definition of bloatware. Software that you don't want on your device. Might not be bloatware for you, but it is for me and the op.

No, it's not. Bloatware is software that most people wouldn't want on a device.

For every app that comes with a device, there's at least 1 person out there who doesn't want that app. So by your definition, phones should come with 0 apps pre-installed?

Quite frankly, I think the post should get downvoted more. It's not an opinion, it's a fact that those apps are NOT necessary for the phone's functionality. The user even mentions that the apps are a 'want' to some users, not a need.

What makes the bloatware annoying is that they cannot be fully uninstalled, only disabled. I'm one of the users who disabled these google apps and it annoys me that I cannot remove them.

That's moving the goalposts, though. The only options aren't "necessary for the phone's functionality" and "bloatware". There's also "apps that most people would find useful", and a calculator, note-taking app, browser, etc. certainly qualify.

Yes, it's (marginally) annoying that you can't uninstall them, but the majority of users won't care.

> I'm one of the users who disabled these google apps and it annoys me that I cannot remove them.

Unless you are running low on space on your phone and really could use those extra megabytes, your annoyance is illogical. That doesn't make it invalid, but it does make it unsurprising that this issue hasn't been addressed.

I think most people would be fine with them shipping them, at least on their own devices, so long it can be fully removed (not disabled) by the end user.

You can disable them, which is the same thing as far as the user is concerned. Uninstalling from a read-only partition doesn't make sense.

Then installing/deploying these apps on a read-only partition doesn't make much sense in the first place.

The idea is that they should survive a factory reset, so the read-only partition is the right place for them. Obviously many of us would be fine if they didn't survive, but that's not really the point.

Why? As far as the user is concerned, the end result is the same. The app doesn't appear in the app drawer, and none of its entry points are exposed to the OS. The user who just bought a phone gets a fully functional phone right out of the box instead of having to wait for downloads. A factory reset to get back to the initial state is as simple as wiping all writable partitions.

Presumably the person you're replying to is a user too, so apparently the end result isn't the same for all of the people you're thinking of.

The person I'm responding to hasn't given any reason why the end result is meaningfully different. As far as we can tell, they just don't like the word "disable." If Android replaced the word with "uninstall," they would presumably be happy, which sounds like a minor complaint.

They take up space.

Isn't it in a read-only partition, where, by definition, you wouldn't be able to reuse the space? Wouldn't it only be users at their storage capacity who would be affected?

The fact they they are installed in a read-only partition is what makes them non-removable, if they were installed in the regular partition then the "system" partition wouldn't need to be so big, they would be removable and you could reclaim the space.

Then you couldn't factory reset without access to a network, as I pointed out.

the experience would be the same if all the apps were disabled by default - and ONLY when the user goes to install them they are able to just enable it instead

No, it wouldn't. The user expects a fully functional phone out of the box, complete with web browser and mail client.

i meant the user who isnt expecting the phone to have what they want gets the experience.

otherwise why allocate disk space to be read only and have apps on it people might not want? (as far as user experience is concerned)

You said, "the experience would be the same." For the vast majority of users who expect the device to be productive out of the box, the experience would be significantly degraded.

ah yeah i did not articulate that fully. i see the implication i was making now

i meant they can maintain an app store experience without the bottlneck of downloading expected apps on day 1. instead of downloading and using data an wasting time, it would enable the app. so its the same "opt-in" experience as downloading but with benefits

They still take up significant space, and they often are re-enabled automatically whenever the device gets updated.

> They still take up significant space

Not usable space.

> they often are re-enabled automatically whenever the device gets updated

This has never happened for me.

Does that mean these apps can't be updated? Or are only updated when the OEM updates android? That's a crazy design deciscion, especially for Chrome!

They update but the original copy on the system partition hangs around. The only way to clean them out is with a rooted phone.

No, it means nothing of the sort. They're updated as usual from Play Store.

Also updates can be uninstalled (since they are on the user partition).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com