Windows users report appearance of unwanted HP app | Hacker News Reader

Windows users report appearance of unwanted HP app

theregister.com

124 pointssoraminazuki112 comments

The OS automatically downloading HP crapware is already bad enough even if I had one of their printers. But this is a new low.

It's sad how the most popular desktop operating system sees users as nothing more than targets for exploitation. It wasn't this bad even in the EEE days.

> To be clear, not all users are affected. Our test Windows 10 PC was far too busy suggesting that we should take a look at Copilot to bother with the HP Smart app nonsense.

The author seems to agree.

> Our test Windows 10 PC was far too busy suggesting that we should take a look at Copilot

I suspect that's because copilot adoption is low - to no surprise since it errors often and steals people's code.

The issue is not if the software is bad or good.

You likely aren’t even referring to the right product. Microsoft 365 Copilot is not GitHub Copilot, but good on you for getting your snark in.

The GP is correct though. It steals your code.

And it does error quite often

I don't know. I don't use it. I'm not even using GitHub for my primary software development.

You need a GitHub account but you don’t need to use GitHub otherwise (e.g. for source control) in order to use Copilot.

> It wasn't this bad even in the EEE days.

This phrasing seems to imply that we are no longer in the EEE days.

This is late stage EEE, or the fabled final 4th E: Exploit.

M̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶p̶o̶p̶u̶l̶a̶r̶ desktop operating system

Most used desktop operating system. There, fixed it for you.

Most endured desktop operating system...

And yet there are so many good alternatives... Never understood why people put up with it

It’s apparently a bug. Now, the QA on Windows Update is another topic.

There is no QA when the team is no longer around, and devs are supposed to make up for it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...

It seems they mostly gave up caring about software quality?

As someone that got burned with the whole WinRT stuff, and eventually returned to distributed computing, I would say they still care, but only on the products that give them money.

Windows nowadays doesn't give them money, at least not enough to really care, Azure, XBox, Office do.

I wouldn't be surprised if WSL2, with enough work, eventually grows up to be Xenix 2.0.

I get that, but an innocent bug is hardly the issue here. It's the job of the operating system vendor to provide a good experience by ensuring that common hardware works without having to install any additional bloatware. Instead, MS is forcing whatever crap hardware vendors made down the users' throat.

https://www.xda-developers.com/windows-update-bug-renaming-p...

Seems like some buggy software/pattern matching identifies all (many?) printers as a particular HP model, and Windows Update "conveniently" installs the HP driver and crapware for it...

RCE as a service?

You can even distribute your own anti-uninstall service like Nahimic does and it's still A-OK as a Windows Update package that's simply force-installed when driver updates are enabled.

I just assume that Windows is doing all sorts of nefarious garbage in the background - it's not your system, it's Microsoft's.

Doesn't seem like it's even Microsofts fully when stuff like this happens

Botnet operators laughing at your comment.

They didn't even bother trying to hide it so the OS refers to "My Computer" rather than "Your Computer"

They renamed "My Computer" a while ago.

Since you don't own the software, you own the license to use the software, the next release will just name it "Satya Computer"

Close. In Windows 8, they renamed it from "My Computer" to "Computer", and in Windows 10 they renamed it again to "This PC".

This all happened around the same time they removed the little "shared" icon from shared folders and also the network traffic indicator (because phoning home is the new normal).

Once your license passes the class warfare test, then you can use Enterprise edition, making it your machine once again.

I dunno my PC is running Enterprise and I still got a fucking search bar appear in the middle of the screen. I only use it for two things I can't get rid of on windows now. Everything else is on the Mac.

The Mac is just renting a nicer hotel room though. It has a comfy bed, nice curtains and the kettle works. Windows is a bed bug infested dormitory where someone stares at you all night.

Apple is a boutique hotel that looks really nice but isn't all that comfortable and where if you don't like the defaults or find any problem you're told you're using it wrong. And you can't just check in, for some reason you have to take a ticket and mill around for 1/2 hour until your name is called .

Windows is a corporate hotel with a big screen TV you can't turn off showing you ads, no curtains and giant brightly lit billboards everywhere outside, phone calls and knocks at the door every 5 minutes to suggest things you can do, and round the clock audio and video recording.

Linux is camping, where all your equipment is missing some small piece (no tent peg, no regulator on gas stove, sleeping bag has no opening, firewood is all wet...) and you have to ask around the campground for how to do the last little bit to get it working.

My understanding is that LTSC with Windows updates turned off completely is the closest thing you can get to that o̶l̶d̶s̶k̶o̶o̶l̶ civilised, respectful, "My Computer" feeling.

The machine I use in this manner has never ever greeted me with an unexpected addition courtesy of the Microsoft enshittification department.

That’s cute that you think it is a single department. Unless, you think this department is like the some KGB level group that then installs politikal officers within every other department to ensure the enshittification is being the best it can be.

I finally got rid of my last windows install last week. Feels good. Windows was a pretty good OS until Windows 8 and then with Windows 10 it turned into a surveillance hellhole.

You can't have any privacy if you use Windows because it talks so much with the mothership. Linux is the only way to have privacy in 2023 which is very sad.

You could install WPD (https://wpd.app/), use Simplewall (https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall) and a pihole on the network to block a lot, but it's still sad that we need to do this.

Apple alternatives include LuLu (https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu)

On Linux you can use Opensnitch (https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch)

...or I could use a operating system that doesn't spy on me per default. :D

Which is what I did and I will support pop!_OS with my hard earned money.

"Would it be that hard for Microsoft to just provide an operating system without needless bloat?"

Not at all, they have one, Windows 10 LTSC, its great! MS just make it extremely awkward to acquire through official channels.

And it's extremely easy through _other_ channels.

Presumably you mean piracy. How reputable are pirate sites these days? There's risk that you'll get malware with that approach.

You download the official ISO and then run a simple one-line script via PSExec (part or SysInternals suite) to disable WLMS. No malware involved.

Personally I would trust something from the pirate community far more than I would something from a giant corp.

Arguably, software companies tend to release more that I would class as "malware" than the pirates do nowadays.

The fourth E: Embrace, extend, extinguish, exhaust.

Users are becoming too exhausted to try to fix all the crap Microsoft throws at them, after they (tried to?) EEE'd all the other easily available options.

(Edit: Oops, pressed send too soon...)

"Welcome to HP TouchPoint Manager. Click here to learn more about HP TouchPoint Manager."

Tried to disable it several times. It always comes back. I will never ever buy a HP product again.

Speaking of Windows Update, does anyone know why it's so terrible?

On your average Linux-distro:

  Run "package-manager update"
  wait for download (ususally pretty quick)
  installs
  might need to restart if there's a kernel upgrade or something
  done.

But on Windows I dread every time there's an update because it's such a shitshow.

Download is slow - hobbyist running their own servers have better bandwidth than a trillion dollar company.

The install is slow.

The install doesn't even finish in the control panel dialog.

There's a second install step just before you restart.

There's a THIRD install step just before you login.

You go to Windows Update again to double check and guess what, it didn't install everything for some reason, repeat the above steps N fucking times.

IIUC windows can't replace currently running binaries, so windows first downloads everything needed for the update, then on reboot it will copy everything to the correct place and then reboot. While on linux your package manager downloads the packages, extracts them and thats it. On some distros that don't support live patching you'll need to reboot after a kernel upgrade.

it is quite amazing that one technical decision on locking is responsible for most of windows' unfixable problems

Are the Linux package manager binary updates (meaning the file updates themselves) transactional somehow? What happens to running processes? Presumably they need to be restarted.

Just overwriting files does not seem sufficient, given my limited understanding…

On linux a file that's open won't get deleted. It'll stay in memory. When you replace a file all it does is point the filename to the new file contents.

Any program open will keep running. Any newly started program will run the new binaries.

Of course this can give trouble with complex programs. Old executables seeing new config files, that sort of thing. But in general this doesn't seem to be a massive issue, and is fairly doable to work around by keeping critical files open all the time.

Thanks! I’m surprised that doesn’t cause more issues (especially with unattended updates on servers), e.g. programs not getting restarted when an update to a library is made, or newly started programs loading incompatible (some combination of old and new) dependencies.

I mean any program code is gonna stay loaded, so that's not an issue. So you're basically only left with resource files potentially causing issues. Most programs won't re-load their configs without getting prompted so that's not a problem either.

I feel like it's one of those things that just happens to cause surprisingly few issues and where they do happen it's either no biggie or gets fixed.

The install being slow is maddening. I used to have a stupidly overpowered Windows workstation I kept offline during analyses. When I would go to patch it, Windows patcher would only daintily sip available resources, and would take incredibly long to complete. I assume this was some directive to keep people from complaining about how much juice it takes to patch in the background, but if I manually click the button that says, “Patch Now”, that should mean engage Ludicrous Speed.

I read this blog post[1] a while back about the Windows memory subsystem performing pathologically bad due to an application (Google Chrome) asking the OS to employ memory throttling, and then blowing past its own self-imposed limits. I had a bit of a chuckle because I've literally run into, and complained about this before, so getting to see how silly it was under-the-hood was great schadenfreude.

These "background-friendly" processes are a sick joke IMO. My experience is they are wasting more power trying to play these stupid games, because by increasing the wall-time it takes to finish their workload, all they really achieve is keeping the CPU in a frequency-boosted state longer than necessary.

Just go fast and let the scheduler throttle you. If the browser updater is making a user-interactive system fall over: their code needs to be better, and the OS kernel needs to be better. If you are doing too much work the answer is "do less work" not "load-smear the frankly ludicrous amount of CPU and I/O." I think it's very indicative of how far desktop software has fallen that people seem to think adding more complexity (in the form of user-mode scheduling) is going to dig them out of the performance hole they dug themselves into.

[1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/32-mib-working-...

Consider yourself lucky, because often Bloatware is not so innocuous. Very far from it.

It is a heinous intrusion on our devices. Take Lenovo, for instance, with its addition of utterly useless fn hotkey pop-ups that covers the screen when hitting caps lock!

And MacOS is no better, as they actually completely break the caps lock key by adding a maddening delay to it. E.g. You have to press and hold for it to activate.

There are no delays with the caps lock key on macOS. What are you talking about?

Ok that's messed up. If i tap it numerous times in succession it stops toggling, every now and then briefly toggling on. Holding it down at any point in the many-tap sequence activates it as you expect in the first place.

There is a delay, I had to install this software to fix it: https://github.com/gkpln3/CapsLockNoDelay

I genuinely don't see any perceivable delay on a Macbook without any third party keyboard customization software installed. Typing caps lock and the letter "a" in quick succession results in an "A" for me.

I took mine to the Apple Store - I genuinely thought the keyboard was broken, never had this on any other computer.

Just disable the silent installation of suggested programs.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/68217-turn-off-automatic...

Or use any software like ShutUp10.

It is more insidious than that, as those programs are bundled alongside the driver in Windows Update.

Damn wasn't Windows Update the "good" way to get printer drivers?

Did anyone ever port CUPS to windows? In my experience, most printers work with it OOTB on Linuxes because they want to support macs. I've had more luck plugging them into a linux box and doing network printing on windows machines.

> because they want to support macs

Well, CUPS has been owned by Apple for a while, "want to support" is an understatement.

HP perhaps nagged them until they "fixed" that.

Or... just use any software like Linux or *BSD.

What's the best Linux for novice users these days?

Linux Mint isn't a bad option IMO.

I would suggest one of the big main trunks of the different distro flavors: debian, arch, or openSUSE (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns)

Debian is stable, but slow, I think of it as "vanilla linux". Most software everywhere is available as dpkg packages, either through apt or through download, and the packages in the repositories are well maintained.

Arch is a rolling updates -based distro with a user repository, so you get even more packages, and you never have to do a separate major distro version update. Arch might require some setting up, but if you can follow a checklist, the installation should be rather easy (although, idk maybe there has been more work done on installation wizards lately)

Alternatively, Arch is nice in that most of the derivatives are compatible with the main line, so here you could opt for e.g. Manjaro or Arcolinux, these give you nice preconfigurations for desktop environments etc., which you would have to setup yourself with vanilla arch.

openSUSE is an opinionated and fully featured distro with a lot of really nice features. It's stable, the distro is backed up by an enterprise version (SUSE linux), and gets some of its stability and featureset from the money, requirements, and attention of an enterprise customer base

> (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns)

FWIW people said the same thing about Ubuntu.

To be perfectly honest. Mint is a decent enough way to get started.

Yes, it's easy to use, yes, that's a good thing.

One very unfortunate thing with "easy to use" distros is that when it fails it's much harder to fix than ones with a steeper learning curve for some reason. But most people have this issue with Windows already.

All things being equal: I would not suggest someone who wants to "get things done" immediately with a linux OS & coming from Windows: to use Arch or Debian.

Most likely I would recommend something like Mint, because it just "gets out of the way" most of the time for the majority of users.

This isn't a holy war, this is pragmatism, and giving people choice is not actually helping them adopt a linux that's best for them.

Just use Mint until you find it has limitations you can't bear, then you'll have enough buy-in and understanding to jump to something that suits your needs. But making the jump in the first place is the most important part. Not what you jump to.

Easy to use is valid.

Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems.

As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux.

I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint.

I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing.

Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint.

I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.

What makes debian slow?

I think it's not slow as in speed, because I'm using a Debian 11 and it feels faster that the Ubuntu 20.04 I was using before on the same machine.

It's probably slow to be up to date with the latest versions of the installed packages. Not a big deal for people using only browsers (they are regularly updated) and LibreOffice (any version will do) or developers (we use docker and language managers, right?) but there might be some class of users that want to stay closer to the edge.

Is ubuntu not based on debian repos anymore? I remember when it was a debian unstable/latest(?) plus the “Ubuntu” part itself. Debian was a set of versions, from stable to “probably will break”, not a single “old” distro.

Anyway it always feels strange when someone claims X is slower/faster than Y, where X and Y are both ~the same kernel and the base system. As if debian maintainers didn’t know some secret “non_vanilla_run_faster: true” settings for the same kernel that was 30 years in development already. Most distros are just slightly different gui programs running on top of basically the same gnu/linux binaries.

Ubuntu is still based on Debian testing.

Slow to update packages, sorry for the confusion

Nothing wrong with the performance!

Pop os! hands down one of the best. The tiling extension literally beats awesomewm, sway, i3 or anything else as it is zero-config and enabled by flipping a switch.

It also brings useful power modes and makes installing drivers easy.

tiling extension

It seems to be pretty similar to FancyZones. Users who moved from windows may find it useful, especially compared to usual learning curves of tiling wms.

https://github.com/pop-os/shell#shared-features

Pop_OS! is actually really good, despite the name.

I used it recently and it gave me a really good impression.

Do note that Pop OS does not support secure boot, which might be difficult to disable on some machines. If that is a deal-breaker I'd recommend either Ubuntu (if you're ok with a MacOS like UI) or Kubuntu (if you want something more like Windows).

I’ll second pop. It’s basically Ubuntu. I’ve been daily driving it on my work laptop the past year and it’s been great.

I thinks they’re using Ubuntu LTS as a base so stable but not cutting edge.

I tried it (Mint) again this spring.

- Nvidia drivers have no per-app settings (I use that) and few settings in general

- It’s unclear if gsync works

- Window movement and scrolling is 30fps-ish despite the RR is 144hz; tearing

- I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big

- Couldn’t set up the mouse pointer to just do what my mouse says (it has metal pads and “precision” rug, all movement is linear) (custom drivers windows-only)

- Sleep function couldn’t deep sleep, only blanked display

- No chance to get random hw like usb wifi to work

- No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools

Ymmw, but when it does not, it’s a rabbithole not worth falling into.

Sad thing is, I’m far from being a newbie. I was an administrator for a whole small office of bsd/linux boxes for few years. You can imagine the volume and the depth of that job. There’s no “can’t do” option. I can solve or at least dig deep into these issues, but after getting this experience and year after year failed attempts to get it right I had to say “no more”. If it doesn’t work as is, for me it doesn’t work at all.

But you’ll probably be fine if your hardware, software and use cases are as standard as can be.

Sleep doesn't work consistently on Windows either, so avoiding Linux won't solve anything. You'd have better luck with Macs.

As for proprietary tools from hardware vendors, that's exactly the kind of software that users don't want. It's literally the whole point of this article. OC / monitoring / fan control should work with standard tooling. It should never require bloatware with flashy "gaming" UIs that advertises its presence in the taskbar and phones home all the time.

Also, as much as I enjoy tinkering with my computer, I'd throw it out the window in frustration if I ever feel the need to manually control the fan while using it.

The specific software I'm using is far from tfa. It help with setting up fan curves and OC settings immediately without rebooting to BIOS and then rebooting again to test these settings under a load. It doesn't even have tray/bg mode.

Same for mouse setup. It's just a bunch of controls that should have been in standard settings of both OSes. Because having a precise pointing device and not being able to turn off some pre-defined "pointer enhancement" bullshit built into an OS is just stupid. These "accelerations" stopped making sense ages ago. I find it ironic that a Proprietary RGB Gaming Mouse Manager actually turns off enhancements and gets off the way.

About sleep, well. Never seen non-working windows sleep myself, neither heard about that from anyone I know. But on linux it is among things that I never even expect to work, regardless of hardware (unless it's an old mid-tier bestseller).

The difference in our experience likely depends on hardware preferences, mainly main board and graphics card. But I'm not going to add another level of insecure pickiness to purchases or to replace around $1-1.5k total in PC parts to maybe please an OS. I know proprietary hardware is not linux'es fault, but if it doesn't work, it does not.

My advice to tfa is to just never buy HP, which is a definition of scam.

> I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big

Mint ships with DEs that aren't great at supporting modern features like fractional scaling. KDE is my preferred choice of DE these days. In fact, I am skeptical on recommending Mint with very new hardware (if this hardware is new).

For me I have a generally opposite experience with my machines, but as you said, it's probably cause of my hardware. I avoid NVIDIA nowadays since I don't trust them with Linux, and generally don't buy unusual or fancy hardware for that same reason.

> No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools

As for fan control, at least on AMD GPUs while I was still still running Mint, I needed a script to get fan control to work. https://github.com/dasunsrule32/radeon-scripts. Bright side is that it isn't proprietary, while dark side is it isn't as intuitive as something like MSI Afterburner unfortunately.

As of now my desktop (which ran Mint) now only runs Windows because I uninstalled Mint thinking it had problems when it was actually RAM. But I also recently got back into Linux with Fedora running KDE Wayland on my ThinkPad since I needed to get a macOS VM working (on the Windows side apparently only Windows 11 can do this properly but I dislike Windows 11), and I am generally pleased with the experience apart from my fingerprint reader not working. Though I don't know if I will stumble into another roadblock again that has nothing to do with the distro itself.

I run KDE Neon on a NUC, and have toyed with the idea of using it on my main desktop for some time now since I rather enjoy it.

However two points keep me from moving over. First is the lack of any good RDP alternative for remote desktop sessions. Nothing I've found so far for Linux is close.

Second is full-disk backups. This has saved my ass a few times over the years, and the ability to be back in action in 30 minutes with minimal loss after a disk crash is something I don't want to be without. Thanks to the Volume Shadow Copy[1] service, the cloning can be online and done in the background while I use the machine.

I know ZFS on root would get me close, allowing me to send snapshots to a backup server, but as much as I like ZFS it's a complicated beast and I see too many issues on the mailing list to feel comfortable doing that.

That said, the list is getting shorter each year, so maybe one day soon.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/fil...

> Second is full-disk backups. This has saved my ass a few times over the years, and the ability to be back in action in 30 minutes with minimal loss after a disk crash is something I don't want to be without. Thanks to the Volume Shadow Copy[1] service, the cloning can be online and done in the background while I use the machine.

I am surprised. I may have had to restore only one computer in a decade because of a hard drive failure.

I think full disc backup is rarely seen on linux systems because the system itself make it so easy to reinstall the way it was.

The only thing I really need to backup to be able to reinstall quickly my fedora is:

- the list of rpm groups and packages that are installed

- the list of flatpak apps that are installed

- a backup of my homedir

- a tarball of /etc

- a kickstart file describing the installation, partitionning, etc.

You don't even need a pxe + tftp server to install from kickstart, just a netinstall iso image and you can pass the `ip=dhcp` and `ks=http://somelocalip/ks.cfg` network parameters at boot to initiate install

It may take a bit more than 30 minutes to reinstall + restoring /home and /etc but you are rolling up again quite quickly. In fact I have tested it much more than I have needed it.

I lost years of work to an IBM Deathstar[1], after which I learned the value of backups. Since then I've had two more disks fail on me, both early SSDs. The ability to be back up and running quickly has been essential both times.

Though I've upgraded disks multiple times by cloning to the new drive, very smooth so that's a nice bonus.

The main thing is that's so simple. There's one thing to remember, and I get back exactly what I had. Having to manually curate a list of things to back up is exactly what I want to avoid, since I might miss something important and only know when it's too late.

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

Well ultimately only my homedir is important. The rest (package list, /etc, partitionning) is just for convenience and speeding up the recovery process but it is never critical.

Full disk recovery was very useful when computers were offline but nowadays you can install apps so quickly you can do it on demand really. I've been in situations where I would switch from one computer to another and I would just copy the homedir. The apps are just installed whenever I need them. Oh needs git, awscli or kubectl? 30s later all are installed and in use.

I am not advocating for this practice, just merely providing a workaround.

"just". You mean well, but all of it should be legislated to off by default.

I shouldn't have to scour third party forums, trying to find out what horrible next thing I have to disable, or be on top of, else my OS will cause me more issues, problems, etc.

And it isn't even a one off. Surprise! Microsoft will add wonderful new ways to cause you issues.

So it's almost like you have to be subscribed to some "how not to get screwed on your new computer and OS" list, and be right on top of it all.

Which is the point really. Exhaust the end user in submission.

People seem concerned about bloatware. I'm concerned about backdoors like this easily being misused.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522325

Well, the author certainly doesn't own an Android phone to witness the ton of crapware it installs.

I've had Android phones since 2010 and none of them have ever installed anything by themselves.

Many Android phones install a ton of apps at the end of the initial setup - stuff like FB, LI, Spotify, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.

While that's true those things are added in by the vendors rather than Android itself, is my understanding.

Yes and anyone who is actually bothered by the bloatware (I've switched to Android for a decade or so) can look up what adb can do (or cough up a few $ and buy some convenient alternative like ADB AppContro - just keep it firewalled). Every new Android device I get goes through a serious bloatware-removal phase before I let it hit the internet. Then the battery lasts so much longer, there are no notifications, etc. A bliss!!

That's because of the vendors and not the OS. Easy to avoid by choosing a decent vendor, all my Android phones the last decade have been Motorola Moto G series because of Android one. No bloat, the only bundled app is to add functionality such as gestures for flashlight/camera and I love it.

Which apps did you get? Deliveroo or that Tetris clone? I got Google Lens and Zalando. </jest>

Yup, every "security update" on my Samsung Verizon phone installs at least 3 crap games. Every single time.

Amateurs. Android phones have been downloading unwarranted Food and Shoe delivery apps for years.

My LineageOS phone is technically an Android, and there have been no unwa(rra)nted downloads.

You probably mean Android consumer phones. Is this the case for every major brand?

My own phone is on LineageOS, but we have a few Samsung phones at work and they don't have special apps other than the Samsung browser, music, etc apps, nothing particularly obnoxious.

My phone was on Xiaomi's MIUI before and although Xiaomi includes many extra apps, some of them useless to me, there were no ads or third-party apps either and even the useless ones somewhat made sense (for Xiaomi's domotics system, etc).

I seem to remember that Xiaomi specifically disabled ads on phones in Europe though, so maybe that's not the case in the US.

Samsung has been getting much better recently about the ability to uninstall apps that you don't really want or need. But it wasn't always like this. :(

Currently a Xiaomi owner with stock firmware (waiting for LineageOS to catch up), and whilst I don't get any advertising[0], I know that the phone seems to be pretty chatty with IP addresses in China at times, as my firewall picks them off (when the phone is on wifi).

There are Xiaomi apps that I'm unable to uninstall (without root as I currently am, which I find mildly annoying.

[0]: I run a Pihole on my home network, but still don't get advertising when I'm on the unprotected mobile network

None of the various Android phones and tablets I've used over the years (many!) have ever downloaded anything by itself, with the sole exception of Samsung's "Upday" news thingy which updates by itself. Oh, and Google Play updates itself. Nothing else ever does (I have automatic updates switched off), and nothing new installs itself, whatever setting is in place. I have never heard about Android installing new apps by itself.

All android devices that i had (which is just two) pulled that on me. Maybe its rare but its noteworthy that it happened twice.

Turns out its not only me https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-stop-installing-apps-...

Not really. Some vendors preinstall a number of apps but none will install new ones on your back.

I have an Redmi Note that had "Google Lens" installed on it twice without me warranting it[1].

And i remember that some years ago, a S3 Mini suddenly had the Zalando App installed after an "Firmware Upgrade".

Its easy to see because the new icons pop up at the end of the menu after the apps that you installed intentionally.

[1] Probably this https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/any-way-to-get-rid-of-go...

> unwarranted Food and Shoe delivery apps for years

... Wait, what? Food delivery apps, I get, fine. Are shoe delivery apps a thing?

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