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Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

"Google prohibitions on bloatware hurt bloatware deal, claims bloatware vendor"

You mean like how my phone shipped with Google music and Google duo, two discontinued services but with applications i now can't delete?

Do you mean Allo? Duo is very much not discontinued.

It’s telling how Google has so many chat services and so many discontinued services that we can’t hope to keep track of them all.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Do you have any idea how much utter garbage Google forces vendors to ship with a phone simply to have access to a web browser and the Play store?

Or perhaps you're one of the lucky few who haven't been woken at 4am to an urgent notification:

"YOUR PHONE HAS TOO MANY MEMES. WOULD YOU LIKE TO DELETE MEMES?"

Prohibitions on bloatware, my arse!

Which apps specifically do you classify as "utter garbage"? Looking at my OnePlus, I can't see anything I'd call that. The most annoying part is that I can't completely uninstall Duo and Chrome, but neither one is on a garbage level, I just prefer alternatives. Otherwise... I think I used pretty much every other default app.

I've disabled the vast majority of Google apps that ship with the phone:

- Chrome: privacy related, not necessarily garbage, but if the OS were Chinese we'd effortlessly call Chrome's behaviours spyware. I use Firefox

- Photos: random single-touch dialogs offering to enable sync. This is upsell and another opt-in data grab. Also the source of the aforementioned ITS 4AM WAKE UP AND HAVE A DELETE MEME PARTY notification. I use f-spot but I'm not a huge fan of it

- Messages: can't remember. Probably another notification thrown up without warning. I use Pulse now

- Maps: where to even begin? The app has about one UI element left that actually relates to navigation and the rest is some disguised Google Shopping link. I use the paid version of OsmAnd where possible

- Gmail/Accounts: phone book data-grab. I use Outlook

- Gboard: still using this. Still very aware its forwarding my keystrokes to the mothership for "contextual prediction" or whatever you call it. If Gboard were published by TikTok rather than Google we'd have sent some folk to the electric chair over it already

- Play Services: mandatory back channel to the mothership with root access on your phone. Can wake it up, force install something that listens to you, or update itself to force you to click on WHO adverts^W^W^W^W participate in informational and beneficial COVID-19 contact tracing, so much more

Probably forgotten quite a bit. Mandatory Games app IIRC? That would have been disabled on the first day

I've had Android phones exclusively for at least 8 or 9 years, use Photos, and have no idea what you mean by the DELETE MEME thing. What is that?

https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoX4/comments/ao45og/files_messag...

Turns out it was Files not Photos

Pixel 3a.

Google assistant.

You can't disable it without breaking other things. You can't disable the shortcuts that open it without unnecessarily regressing the rest of the UI. It's bound to "swipe up from a corner" which is an action you accidentally perform on a semi-regular basis. It's utterly and completely useless (to me).

You can literally disable it by setting the assistant app to "None".

Really? Where do I find that setting? I've looked, hard. Edit: Found it - I wonder if this is new or if I missed it when I got the phone - thanks!

Doesn't stop it from being bloatware...

This feature has been around since Ice Cream Sandwich, released 2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Ice_Cream_Sandwich

> Certain "System" apps (particularly those pre-loaded by carriers) that cannot be uninstalled can now be disabled. This hides the application and prevents it from launching, but the application is not removed from storage.

Disabling google assistant broke various unrelated features.

What I just found out I can do above is change the "Assistant" default app from being "Google Assistant" to being none - which stops the stupid swipe in the wrong way and it grabs focus and the bottom half of the screen "feature".

Edit: And to be clear this doesn't remove all the places Assitant pops up, just the most annoying one. It still has prominent placement in the "system" settings for instance.

Are you sure you disabled Google Assistant (via one of two settings) and not the "Google" app which contains significantly more functionality than just the Assistant?

Understand that I played with this a year ago, so my memory is a bit hazy.

I believe that what happened was was after looking for any way to disable just assistant (e.g. under the "Assistant" system settings option) and not finding any I have up an tried to disable it at the app level. At the app level I saw (and still see) only a option to disable all of Google.

It probably did not occur to me at the time to check the default app settings.

> via one of two settings

I only found the default apps way, what is the other?

Ah, sorry, I should have been paying better attention.

Been there since Assistant APIs became a thing in Android 6.

You can also disable Google app to stop it from running. You'll lose the other services it provides though.

Deep integration with Assistant is one of the main selling points of Pixel devices. New assistant features come to Pixel first, sometimes only work with Pixel, and the device has been built to have as much integration with Google's services as possible.

There's plenty of bloatware on phones these days, especially with the rate Google kills apps, but I can't honestly consider the Assistant integration with a Pixel phone to be one.

The whole reason I bought a Pixel is Google Assistant, so calling it bloatwear seems a stretch.

Also it doesn't seem bound like that on my phone.

> Also it doesn't seem bound like that on my phone.

Iirc it is enabled when you set System->Gestures->system navigation set to gesture navigation? I recommend setting that for the superior ui it provides.

My experience with the stock Android experience from Pixel phones is a dream of zero bloatware. What I hate is the bloatware that nearly every handset maker puts on their phones, and the additional bloatware wireless providers add on to it, almost none of it uninstallable.

How its dream of zero bloatware when Google itself adds tons of Bloatware starting from Play Music, Books, Duo, Drive what not.

I am even ok shipping them by default and giving an option to uninstall. Any app which I cant uninstall is Bloatware.

Don't forget that Google embedded Duo into the Google Play Framework so even if you disabled or uninstalled the app, people could still call you via Duo.

Google did this with Google+, immediately rendering my Nexus One obsolete because I didn't have enough storage for the framework :( the update basically bricked the phone. Even uninstalling literally everything possible wouldn't fix it.

I miss that phone so much.

You mean Google enabled E2E encrypted calls to every Android device?

That sounds like a good thing. Duo is still pretty much the only E2E encrypted video call app that also works on the web.

Stock Pixel, at the very least, is _packed_ with Google apps that you cannot fully remove.

Projects like Graphene/Copperhead/Lineage are built off AOSP which has no Google apps.

GrapheneOS.org

The developer of GrapheneOS seems unhinged. Accusing Mozilla of orchestrating 4chan and all that. [1] I don't trust it's stability.

1 - https://twitter.com/DanielMicay/status/1264528965127024644

Hmm.. Doesn't seem relevant to the quality or longevity of the project.

People often seem surprised when I tell them I sleep withy phone on silent and / or in flight mode.

I believe I can even set some numbers to ring through silent, haven't tried it though.

Sleep is precious.

Typically I sleep with the phone charging in a different room. Is that weird?

I'm trying to parse if you're going after OnePlus, because they build pretty solid phones.

Now of we we're taking about carriers we'd have a different conversation but as someone who's seen a lot of the mobile industry OnePlus is pretty decent on the bloatware in my book.

Lots of the HN crowd are Apple only users and their last Android experience was a 2012 Samsung so that's their point of reference.

Also, HN is also mostly American where carrier bloatware is the norm on Android, something I never saw in Europe.

It seems that those days are gone.

Their recent Nord phone shipped with the full and uninstallable Facebook services suite (1). In a forum post(2) they claim it was done to improve battery life and performance. Reading about this Fortnite launcher deal makes me doubt the honesty of that claim even more.

A few months ago they also started pushing strange and invasive system apps to my OnePlus 6T like "OnePlus Zen Mode", "OnePlus Game Space", their own custom File Manager which - in India - even sent data to a Tencent server for some strange file cleanup functionality that could not be disabled (3)(4)!

I love my OnePlus 6T but writing this out made me realise how distrustful and wary I've become of this company that has access to a huge part of my life through my phone.

I'm now seriously considering replacing this device way early in its lifecycle. No idea what brand to turn to next though.

1. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/05/oneplus-is-poisonin...

2. https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/allow-user-to-choose-whic...

3. https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/petition-against-file-man...

4. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/05/07/oneplus-6-6t-users-...

Edit: Added link 4.

If it really was prohibitions on bloatware, Samsung would be the first to know.

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