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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

This removes one of my pet peeves about android. Now please allow users full control over uninstalling non system applications. I hate that I cannot uninstall Facebook and Twitter on my HTC one. My past Droid Charge by Samsung (on Verizon) was even worse since it installed a whole bunch of useless applications that I had no way to uninstall. I hated that phone every single time I used it.

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That's on your carrier/manufacturer, not part of Android itself.

It shouldnt be on the carrier / manufacturer. Whats innately different about the software on phones as compared on Windows / OSX / linux ... that the user cant be trusted with administrative rights on their machine?

Uhm, yes, that, precisely. Most of Android is on a level playing field - core framework services get elevated permissions under the system group but they're still apps. If you let the user uninstall them, all hell will break loose. It's like removing the svchost.exe process in Windows. Or removing /bin/sh in Linux. The rest just doesn't work without it. Things like Contacts, Calendar storage, Bluetooth, Play Store, Google Backup, etc, etc, are all in /system/app, where manufacturers also put their apps.

If you ask me, manufacturers should be prohibited from adding to /system/app but that's not how the Android licensing works. So, we get un-uninstallable apps (vote with your wallet - buy only Nexus experience!).

Learning the nexus lesson slowly.

With 4.1+ Jelly bean, you can at least disable the system apps. That way, the only thing you are losing is some storage.

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