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Comment by hysan | Hacker News Reader

> "unremovable"

> you can't completely remove it

Maybe my English isn’t very good but that sounds like the definition of unremovable.

To be pedantic, yes, but not in a way that matters. The system partition is read-only. Mounting it read-write would require root and any modifications would break system updates. The apk will still be physically present in the file system, however, none of its code will run and it will be removed from your launcher and installed app list in settings, which IMO still counts as a removal.

Also, English is not my native language. I feel like I did get my point across anyway.

It's not being pedantic. Disabling the application does not give me the storage space back.

If people are paying for upgrades to storage space it's completely reasonable for them to be annoyed by bloatware

The system partition is usually the same size regardless of which storage option of the same phone model you get.

But if the system partition could be smaller, other partitions could be larger.

The system partition is made some fixed size, the same way disk partitioning works on PCs, and never resized, because resizing file systems is still a non-trivial task. It often has some free space too to accommodate future system updates.

On my 128 GB Pixel 9 Pro, /data is 109 GB. The rest is /system (although `df -h` doesn't show it explicitly, no idea what's up with that) and various other system-related partitions.

Yes, but if the phone shipped with less bloatware on the system partition, then maybe that partition would be made smaller initially.

Meaning the user would have access to more of the phone’s advertised storage.

You have succeeded in splitting hairs down to the atomic level. Fissionable HN comments!!

Or perhaps there would be less incentive for the OEM optimize for disk space and it ends up taking the same amount of space.

Even with the outrageous prices for phone storage upgrade, an entire gigabyte of inactive bloat would be a $1 impact. It's not a big deal.

There’s an enormous difference between “it can’t be stopped” and “its storage area can’t be reclaimed” though.

It's in a read only filesystem. You can't modify read only data, but you can choose to ignore it.

Only because it is mounted as one. It is like saying that you can't have your house in pink because it is green.

If you modify a file on the partition the device will fail to boot. Your metaphor is not equivalent because it ignores security.

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