It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever.
When buying a new phone I always spend some time deleting all Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and carrier related apps. Yes, you can delete 'undeletable' apps through ADB, without rooting the device.
> It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever.
I'm old enough to remember when this was standard. Before smartphones almost all cellphones were bought through carriers and came pre-loaded with a bunch of carrier crapware (often unremovable). One of the best things about the first iPhone was that Apple retained control of the pre-installed apps and AT&T was not allowed to put a bunch of their own garbage on it. 12 years later the lack of crapware remains a key differentiator for iPhones. But what's most surprising is that in an industry where everyone seems keen to copy even Apple's worst ideas (no headphone jack, notches) only a few are copying some of their best.
Like the iPhones, phones distributed by Google, starting with the Google Phone G1 in 2008, and continuing to the Nexus phones and today's current Pixel phones (Pixel 1, 2, and 3), have never had crapware.
That isn't really accurate, you're just defining "crapware" is such a way so that Google's apps don't qualify. That's a double standard.
Google Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, Play Music, Play Movies, Play Games, Play Books, Duo, Google+, and YouTube could all be called as crapware since they aren't required for core phone functions (and upsell for-profit services).
I guess it is somewhat a discussion what we mean by "crapware." But I'd argue most reasonable definitions include at least some of Google's pre-installed apps.
> That isn't really accurate, you're just defining "crapware" is such a way so that Google's apps don't qualify. That's a double standard.
I need to clarify - I'm not an Apple hater, I own an iPhone, 2 iPads, 2 Macbook Pros and a Mac Mini at the time of this comment.
But, this same logic can be applied to Apple as well. For example, I don't use Apple's photos app at all. And I can't delete it. There is absolutely no way to even replace it. The same logic applies to Apple's crappy music app as well. I use Spotify 100% of the time. Not to mention the constant push to upgrade to Apple music on a system default app is unacceptable.
The photos app isn't crucial to my iPad's core functions. Yet I get constantly harassed with upgrade to iCloud bullshit constantly. Same thing goes with App Store as well, which has no way to turn off upgrade notifications. This is even true of Mac OS X as well, where I get notified constantly to upgrade to Mojave when I have no plans to do so...so that Apple can make my system slower and force me to upgrade my otherwise perfectly functional Mac. It's not like they haven't done this in the past, so...that's the real double standard I would argue.
What really pissed me off with the last iOS upgrade was the change the made to HomeKit. I had it connected up with my WeMo and Philips Hue devices, and could use Siri to turn on lights, etc.
After the upgrade, I was suddenly required to sign into HomeKit with my Apple ID. What for? It was all working fine without it. None of my "smart" devices need a cloud connection to function. I prefer to not connect everything to the cloud when my home network works just fine for me. Since I refuse to sign in out of spite for this change, now I can't control things with Siri.
You can remove most of the non-essential apps like Music, iTunes Store, Maps, News.
I consider Photos and essential app to the phone. But the push to iCloud could be annoying (I haven’t experienced it because I already have it). If I remember correctly, android phones come with a Gallery App for Photos and then additionally Google Photos. This was a few years ago, I’m not sure if it has changed. Whereas iPhones come with Photos and the iCloud functionality built in.
> Well, no, you can just hide the icon on the screen. That’s all that does
This is no longer true since some version of iOS 11. Deleting apps removes them from your system, and you must redownload them from the App Store to get them back. However, while the application bundle might be removed from your device, the frameworks it relies on don't.
Disabling system apps on Android doesn't just hide the icon, it stops the app from running (e.g., via intents or other means by which you can run an app without clicking on the icon.) It's in practical effect no different than deleting a non-system app, except that physically the app is still in immutable storage on the device and can be reenabled without being downloaded (barring any subsequent updates to the bundled system version, which would need to be downloaded.)
There are functional differences on iOS. For example if you “delete” Apple Music, Siri loses the ability to tell you what song is playing on Spotify (although I haven’t tried it since the original option to delete was added)
Functionally, isn't that much the same as disabling an Android system app?
I wonder if these articles would cease if Android simply changed the label "disable" to "delete" and removed the ability to view and re-enable disabled apps.
You would probably want to download the latest update rather than using the old version from the system image, but that's correct. Though IIRC the Facebook "app" the article complains is just a minimal placeholder, with the real app downloaded from the Play Store.
There are some built-in iOS apps that can't be deleted at all, such as Photos. For those that can be "deleted" Apple says users can restore them by downloading the app from the App Store.
But if a user deletes all the built-in apps that can be deleted, are they restored if the iOS device is reset? I would assume so, since wiping a phone is recommended before reselling it and a new user may be confused if default apps are missing, though I don't want to wipe my device just to confirm.
> There are some built-in iOS apps that can't be deleted at all, such as Photos.
Yes, because if you take photos you kinda need a way to view them. It would be extremely confusing if your pictures you took with Camera ended up being saved somewhere but you could not view them, so Apple seems to have just made it a requirement.
> But if a user deletes all the built-in apps that can be deleted, are they restored if the iOS device is reset? I would assume so, since wiping a phone is recommended before reselling it and a new user may be confused if default apps are missing, though I don't want to wipe my device just to confirm.
That's a good question, and I don't want to wipe my device either. I'll see if I can get access to a "burner" iPhone to test this.
Yeah, I agree it makes sense that certain apps shouldn't be easy to get rid of, though in comparison Android does let users disable apps such as the default gallery, browser, and even app store. I think the stock dialer and SMS apps are the main exceptions.
If deleted built-in apps aren't restored even after resetting an iOS 12 device, it's a good thing some apps aren't removable. I wish I'd thought to check before trading in my old iPad.
When you redownload a now-deleted-preloaded app, it actually downloads it. You can see the progression in the App Store. Which makes me think that Apple actually removes the App package from the phone.
This is how disabling apps in Android works also. There is a baseline version baked into the ROM, but any updates are installed into normal memory. Disabling the app removes the updates from normal memory, so when you enable the app again it will (likely) need to update.
> I consider Photos and essential app to the phone.
So do I, but OS vendors are making that experience worse by 'integrating' it to some cloud bullshit whether I want it to or not.
My Galaxy S7 (with all the bloatware the article mentions) was replaced with an "Android One" device from Nokia. First thing I noticed on the Nokia was that the only gallery app was Google Photos, which I want nothing to do with.
The Galaxy S7 had Google Photos, but also Samsung's stock Gallery app, which I greatly preferred because it acts exactly like the dumb pipe I want it to. Same with Samsung Music. On the Nokia, I had to install an alternative app because Play Music is unusable with the constant nagging to join their streaming service.
You can turn off iCloud sync in iOS, and you can even do it for Photos specifically. I do because I don't care to have it backed up to iCloud, which I don't pay for.
You know what you can't do with iOS? Use a 3.5mm jack. :D Realistically though I found iOS to be too restrictive and I dislike that there's only one theme that's available. It was far too bright for my eyes at night even with it turned all the way down. Checking my phone at night would often wake my wife. I can't believe that iOS doesn't have a dark theme.
> If I remember correctly, android phones come with a Gallery App for Photos and then additionally Google Photos.
It depends on the phone. On Pixel devices, which is arguably the closest on the Android side to Apple phones in terms of being curated, it's just Photos, plus the ability to swipe back in the camera app.
The Photos App is pretty much the end-all, be-all of accessing photos taken by the iPhone's camera. So it makes sense that it's a default app that is uninstallable.
I get constantly bugged to upgrade to Mojave on my work computer, where corporate IT policy has disabled being able to install it. So the installer can tell I can't do it, but not the notifier.
This is identical to how all other phone OS vendors work where the OS vendor pre-installs apps as part of their ecosystem. If you consider them crapware, then there are no major mobile OS vendors who don't install crapware.
iPhone preinstalls 42 apps, not all of which can be easily deleted: App Store, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Clock, Compass, Contacts, FaceTime, Files, Find My Friends, Find My iPhone, Game Center, Health, Home, iBooks, iCloud Drive, iMovie, iTunes Store, iTunes U, Keynote, Mail, Maps, Messages, Music, News, Notes, Numbers, Pages, Passbook, Phone, Photos, Podcasts, Reminders, Safari, Settings, Stocks, Tips, TV, Videos, Voice Memos, Wallet, Watch, Weather
Android comes with 29 preinstalled apps, and like iPhone some of them cannot be easily deleted: Android Pay, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Chrome, Clock, Contacts, Docs, Downloads, Drive, Duo, Gmail, Google, Google+, Keep, Maps, Messages, News & Weather, Phone, Photos, Play Books, Play Games, Play Movies & TV, Play Music, Play Store, Settings, Sheets, Slides, YouTube
If the default apps are restored after a factory reset then "deleting" a built-in app in iOS isn't really any different from disabling an Android system app.
It reads just like the android way of disabling: Removes cache and user data, if you go to the app-store to 'enable' it again it has a small install file already on system and either automatically updates before use (iOS) or puts available updates in the download queue (android).
What happens if you resell an iPhone from which you've "deleted" apps such as Contacts, Maps, and Music? Does wiping and resetting the device restore it to stock condition, including those default apps?
If not, that seems potentially confusing for secondhand users. Some apps such as Phone and Photos cannot be removed in any way, but users may still be confused if other default apps are missing.
Safari, AppStore, Phone, Messages, Clock, Photos, Camera, Health, Settings. I think that's the full list of the apps that can't be removed from iPhone.
Not getting at you personally here :) just... it's astonishing how quickly we've gotten used to the idea that you'll pay hundreds of dollars for a licence to use a device that you're not really in control of.
I agree it's good to have someone else looking after your device for you.
But Samsung's flavour of Android is not that. You have to pay extra attention because you can't trust it not to trick you into something you don't want — “agreeing” to adverts or sending personal data. You're constantly batting away flies. It's user-hostile, not user-friendly.
This is why I prefer Fedora to Windows: the intent of the person managing my device for me is to make a useful tool (not to enhance my experience in association with select commercial partners), and this aligns with my goals.
Peace of mind is precisely why well-maintained free software is more user-friendly than consumer shovelware.
(My job involves testing a website. This week I used a Samsung Galaxy S5. Peel Remote™ has to be an extremely elaborate parody… right?)
You can remove all of the Google apps, though. (You can't remove the storage space they take up on the phone's ROM, as they ship on the stock device so that they don't need a download at setup time, but you can completely disable them so that they're treated as not installed.)
Also, these days, people consider photos, music, videos, email, and similar to be core phone functions; frankly, many people use them more often than they make phonecalls.
(Personally, I disable around half of those apps, along with Chrome.)
I disagree with a definition of crapware that emphasizes the inability to remove, rather than the clear crappyness. I would call the first mandatoryware.
To me, crapware is:
- Order of magnitude bad engineering by industry standards (esp if it is not customer centric).
- So bad that if it could be removed, a majority of people who know how would remove it immediately.
- So bad that if [FANG / anyone competent at software] designed an alternative, most people would switch to it.
Crapware for me is not identically equivalent to mandatoryware. I get the GNU-like hate for mandatoryware from some people, but it's useful to have a distinction between (potentially subpar) mandatoryware like IE in Windows XP, and the absolute rubbish that was Verizon Music Store on my 2005 flip phone.
I mean... then Apple bundles crapware too. iTunes Store, Pages, Weather, Find Friends, and a bunch of other stuff that I put in a folder inside a folder and promptly forgot about when I got my first iPhone.
Actually, most of them are removable! Only a few apps that are deeply tied to the system (Settings, Photos, App Store, Clock, Messages, etc) can’t be deleted, but you can remove Maps, Weather, Music, Calculator, etc.
That's what I thought too. Bought a Nokia/HMD android one phone, not through my carrier. After I put my SIM in and booted the phone it started downloading crapware my provider offers...
Luckily downloaded regularly through the play-store, so I could just immediately delete it afterwards. But it still seems there's deals going on there even if you don't buy the phone from your carrier and it's android one.
I have (outside of my personal iPhone) an LG ThinQ 7 through work and I don't recall it coming loaded with a bunch of crapware, either. There were your standard apps plus "LG Switch" which is for file transfers and "LG Health" which is pretty self-explanatory. Beyond that there was NextRadio as the phone has an FM receiver. Plus the Google Play stuff.
Not too bad. Can't say anything about their other phones, though.
(Prior to this phone I had a Samsung S6 and that thing was nightmarish with all the bloatware)
> “But what's most surprising is that in an industry where everyone seems keen to copy even Apple's worst ideas (no headphone jack, notches) only a few are copying some of their best.”
this is not surprising at all when you consider the ability to add crapware was a key differentiator for carriers of android relative to ios. ios threatened to disintermediate carriers out of phones, reducing the carriers’ value in the value chain. as iphones became popular, carriers glommed onto android to combat that threat. they continue to do so to keep apple at bay and maintain control over the phone.
All phones have undeletable apps provided by their manufacturers. For example, on iPhones you cannot delete Messages, Phone, Safari, Clock, Photos, Health, App Store, and Camera in a conventional way.
That's the manufacturer playing shenanigans. Unfortunately, it happens (Samsung?). It is still disable-able, just not as easily, as you need adb and usb cable.
You're getting it confused with Google Mobile Services which is the crapware in question.
> Android is also associated with a suite of proprietary software developed by Google, called Google Mobile Services[10] (GMS) that very frequently comes pre-installed in devices, which usually includes the Google Chrome web browser and Google Search and always includes core apps for services such as Gmail, as well as the application store and digital distribution platform Google Play, and associated development platform. These apps are licensed by manufacturers of Android devices certified under standards imposed by Google, but AOSP has been used as the basis of competing Android ecosystems, such as Amazon.com's Fire OS, which use their own equivalents to GMS.
> You better update Wikipedia with that information then
I'm under no obligation to correct every error in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia> Amazon Fire OS is an Android-based mobile operating system
It's actually AOSP-based, more than Android-based (whether the relationship between the two is such that the former is a subset of the latter is...another discussion.) But even Android-based isn't Android (OS X is BSD-based, but not BSD; MariaDB is MySQL based, but not MySQL; the legal systems of much of the US are English Common Law-based, but not English Common Law)
Android devices, Android-compatible (per the ACP) devices, and devices running derivatives of the AOSP source code constitute a sequence in which each item describes a superset of the set described by the preceding item.
It is Android. You go into your settings and enable installation from unknown sources to install the Play store and run android apps just like any other android device.
Android.com shows Amazon Fire devices as examples of the wide freedom Android offers, so apparently Google disagrees with your definition of "Android".
Windows 10 comes with crap even in Pro version these days (Candy Crush etc.), so it was just because nobody cared enough to create that crap for Windows Phone.
I'm sure there was plenty of crap available. Didn't MS pay developers cash for any garbage they shoveled in just to get the "We have XXXX aps available" count up?
The real "problem" was nobody wanted to pay Microsoft for the privilege of having their crap preinstalled.
These aren't preinstalled though. It places a tile in the default setup for it, and the app gets installed if you click on it. If you delete the tile instead, the app is never even installed.
At least the Nexus phones I've had also never came with crap ware. This is yet another reason why I would only ever by a Android phone from Google. Of course the main reason are the longer update cycles that might even delay arrival of security updates. I really wish Google had gone the exact same route as Apple and only shipped Android phones themselves. To me the collaboration with random manufacturers also weakened the Nexus brand. I have zero brand loyalty to Samsung, LG or HTC. I wanted a Google phone. My iPhone doesn't say "Foxconn" on it, so why did my Nexus say "LG" and the next one "Samsung"?! I'm always surprised that these concerns apparently aren't shared by the market and people are happily buying Samsung phones with crap on it and unnecessary changes to Android that just result in getting updates super late.
In that Google is a marketing entity perhaps it's simply exercising one of the circa 2002 Spolsky doctrines linked to yesterday (https://www.gwern.net/Complement)? As far as Goggle's concerned the Androids are commodities that exist to run marketing-related software. FWIW I share your desires and wishes.
OEMs have always made better phones than Google themselves by improving and enhancing Android. Many improvements to Android came from Samsung, HTC and Motorola - the OEMs. Post 5.0, Google has only ever made improvements to Android to benefit its own hardware and ecosystem. For example, the Galaxy Nexus had no MicroSD slot even though the Galaxy phone it was based on did. Even now, Samsung is offering a phone with a headphone jack whereas Google has made their last two phones without, in a completely anti-consumer move.
Today's "Samsung crap" is tomorrow's "Brand-new Android feature that you need to enable Google tracking to use"
Before the program cancellation,there were talks on making this happen. They didn't do it, but considering it was preload apps or cancellation, that just goees to show how desperate of a move preloadsare in general.
Source : I was part of a team whose app was getting primed up for a preload on WP8.
My LG has LG software preloaded and t-mobile software pre loaded. it just takes up space and would be fine, but it is annoying. One of the LG pieces of software (i thin it is a back up thing) does not work anymore, but still exists. An silly things like the t-mobile permanent unlock your phone app. My phone has been paid for for like a year and if i click the app and request a permanent, or temp unlock it says i am not eligible, but i cannot uninstall the app.
I have heard the argument about being able to hide the apps, but it is not the same. This is the first android phone i have had where i didnt root it and install a new android version. Just got tired of that (lack of security updates). So i am stuck with crapware.
It was explained only zillion times, but I will try one more:
In android, you have storage in two partitions: /system and /data.
/system is read-only, this is where anything that is shipped with phone is stored. Outside of system updates, it is not being touched.
/data is, where user data, installed applications, configuration, etc. is stored.
To factory reset the phone, you just wipe the /data. No separate partition for factory reset is necessary, because /system due to its immutability doubles as one. Anything you configure/change/etc is stored on /data. If you disable any bundled app, whether through gui or adb, the info that you disabled it is written into /data.
Once you want to sell your phone on craiglist, you wipe /data and the buyer gets exactly the same software you originally got.
There is also secondary use of the immutability: android system is distributed as partition image, not as a file archive. That means, that the physical fs layout is same for all devices of the same SKU, can be signed (dm-verity), and then verified at boot, whether the filesystem was modified or not. This is being used for ensuring secure boot, and unsealing secrets in trusted environment.
What you're saying is that Android has undeletable apps because Android was created in such a way that it allows undeletable apps. Which is circular logic.
And the issue here is pretty clearly that users have to resort to adb to disable these apps. Why does Android force this? There is no reason, it could easily be built into the Android GUI.
> And the issue here is pretty clearly that users have to resort to adb to disable these apps
No, you can disable (not delete or uninstall) nondeletable (system) apps on Android without adb. adb also lets you “uninstall” them for a given user (but not from the device), which makes them less visible to the user than disabled apps, but it's not clear to me that it does anything substantively different, since neither disabled nor uninstalled-for-current-user apps run.
> Why does Android force this? There is no reason, it could easily be built into the Android GUI.
The only difference I am aware of between disabling through the GUI and uninstalling for a particular user with adb is that the former allows you to reenable through the UI if you later choose to, whereas the latter removes it from the All Apps list in Settings, making it invisible from the UI and impossible to enable.
Requiring the latter to require the user to use the same tool necessary to reverse the process makes it less likely that users will accidentally do something that the same user can't reverse if they change their mind.
If you are so much bothered by Android design, adjust your POV slightly: consider /system to be recovery partition (you cannot delete anything from any recovery partion of any system, so Android is no exception here) that shares data blocks with main system, created at boot in RAM. Because that it effectively is.
You don't have to resort to ADB to disable these apps for the most part; You can do it in Settings. For some apps you cannot do that in GUI - for Settings itself, for example, so the users don't shoot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, some manufacturers abuse this and mark as undisable-able apps, that they shouldn't. Over ADB, they can't disable it, so it works for any app, including Settings.
I'm assuming it's to avoid a situation where Grandma accidentally deletes her web browser and the Play Store and doesn't know how to unbrick her phone.
It doesn't have undeletable apps, since adb lets you delete anything (although the exact semantics of "delete" will be different for apps that are installed on the system partition - but not in a way that matters to end users).
It has apps that cannot be installed from the phone UI. Which kinda makes sense, since you don't want people randomly uninstalling, say, the app store, and then complaining that their phone is bricked. OTOH, someone who knows how to do this via adb can be presumed to know what they're doing.
Windows Phone didn't survive in the market long enough to start adding crapware. With their < 1% market share (not exaggerating), it's not like app makers were knocking down MS' doors to include their apps on WP devices.
for the longest time ios would have facebook\twitter in settings even if you uninstall it(still residual but mostly deleted and took miniscule space) but at least you could get rid of it within a few taps.
Laptops with preinstalled Windows also have a tremendous amount of crapware from various vendors. Trial versions of antivirus software, system "optimizing" apps, sometimes outright spyware too.
Thankfully Mac users don't have to put up with this kind of consumer-hostile bullshit.
Macs have all consumer Apple apps preloaded, and the user cannot delete them without reinstalling macOS from scratch.
Imagine a poor user, getting Apple computer with 128GB SSD, where 10GB or more is being taken by GarageBand or iMovie, which he isn't going to touch during the machine lifetime.
It used to be if you did the Windows installation yourself from a clean image from Microsoft, you didn't get crapware. With Windows 10 I can report this is no longer true. You get Candy Crush and all sorts of nonsense. I had a non-removable XBox app. I had to disable a lot of crap to get Windows 10 to perform well in a VM on one of my machines.
I know I can clean up crapware, via adb, but on principle vote with my wallet. It's not acceptable to charge me something that rounds to a thousand euros and then fleece me for a few extra bucks.
Right now, I restrict my selection to Android One [1] phones. The current one is a Nokia 8 Sirocco.
I bought Nokia 6.1s for my parents. Only $225 for a phone with great build quality, more than acceptable performance, quick security updates and a pure Android experience. The 32GB of storage is plenty for them.
The biggest drawback is probably the camera which although not horrible is a few years behind recent flagship phones. Not everyone cares about having the latest greatest camera on their phone. The camera is perfectly fine for my Mom to send me a picture of the latest thing she saw at Costco for a great price which she thinks I need to get and that will account for 90% of photos taken with their phones.
Mid-range Android phones that are part of the Android One program have really started making it difficult to justify spending the money flagship Android phones are costing these days.
Similarly, I've got Nokia 7.1 for my father last Christmas. It was 330 EUR (including VAT), Android One, with Pie already available. The camera is perfectly fine for him.
Once my phone will start acting up, it will be difficult to justify the expense for a flagship, when midranges are as good as they are.
I've had similar feelings... having finally ditched my Huawei Nexus 6P, which I came to loathe. This was after years of buying Google developer devices (going back to the G1). The 6P was the last straw, as I came to resent spending hundreds on something with a soldered-in battery that could be (and turned out to be) unusable after 24 months. The battery was a wreck.
I ended up getting an unlocked new LG V20 from eBay, which is a slightly older phone, but the most decent spec I could find with a replaceable battery. Been great so far, so it's been worth it for $190. Got a couple of spare LG batteries too, for $25 each.
Nice reminder about the ADB uninstall trick, as there's some AT&T stuff that would be nice to remove if possible. I'm also tempted by LineageOS, but need the core Google Android apps - so probably too suspicious to use a bundled install that someone else has put together.
Odd question. I bought V20 as a replacement for a Zenfone ( long story ). I like it. It does its job. I think I tried everything and I cannot root it. ADB just does not work regardless of what I try.
Careful about buying 'new' copies of that phone on Ebay: there are none. Almost all of the new copies bring sold on Ebay for the last year or so are fraudulent. Finding an actual new LG V20, outside of perhaps Korea, is unlikely.
edit: just checked Ebay, and yup, there are no legit new copies to be had, except for maybe AT&T or unlocked variants for $400+. There's a very low chance that anyone will be/or has been able to find a new LG V20 for at least a year, and almost certainly not for a reasonable price.
It is a similar situation for numerous other smartphones on the used market, most new copies for sale are actually remanufactured/used that have been repackaged and fraudulently resold as new from somewhere [originally] in China. The fake LG V20 new copies began flooding the market somewhere in the past 1-2 years, and have dominated since, but that practice is typical for smartphones in general.
Item was described as "new and sealed factory unlocked", and I had no complaints when it arrived. If it is repackaged, I was completely unable to tell any difference from other new devices I can remember unpacking (new from Amazon or directly from a vendor). The spare batteries I sourced from a separate UK supplier.
It's definitely intended for AT&T, but worked fine with Three in the UK as soon as I entered the appropriate APN info and restarted.
Ah, perhaps my experiences are only valid for US/North American buyers of US carrier variants. I know that there was a proliferation of repackaged V20 models being sold as new, and they all seemed to come from the same source - they had the same packaging Chinese/international packaging, but the devices included were used/remanufactured and were often incorrectly-specced for their purported carriers, giving away their fraudulent origins.
Like the packaging shown in that Ebay link is incorrect for an AT&T variant. AT&T almost never uses OEM packaging, instead they use some weird gimpy branded boxes of their own. If it didn't come in a box like this, then it was a fraudulently repackaged and was not new:
Also the printed inserts should have AT&T branding on them, and will include AT&T-specific inserts. The flood of fraudulent LG V20s usually include generic international versions of the printed inserts. Watch for the IMEI label on the box being pasted over with another label, to hide the ID numbers of the device the box originally came with.
Just because its not new doesn't mean it might not work fine, it just means you'll likely never get warranty coverage; or if you do get LG to accept it once they examine in-house for repair you're probably boned.
I also would have gone with Nokia because of their clean software and build quality... But they are doing weird strategies with the European market. E.g. it's almost impossible to get the 64GB version, or if you can it has a massive price increase. Or some good models just don't get released here, like the 6.1 Plus.
What's your experience with Android One? First time I hear about it but I'm intrigued, doesn't it come from Google anyway? So the "secure" claims are kind of empty?
I'm using a Xiaomi Mi A1 for some time now and so far so good. I was looking for a pure Android experience without all the crapware and custom UI's that come from any major phone brand and this is exactly what I got.
Also, direct updates from Google for 2 years without interference from the brand (Xiaomi in this case). Which means I have security updates every month.
I'm not going to buy anything that's not an AndroidOne from now on, with the exception of a Pixel.
> Also, direct updates from Google for 2 years without interference from the brand (Xiaomi in this case). Which means I have security updates every month.
You got exactly NONE updates from google. "Android One" has a requirement for vendors to provide updates. All those updates were from xiaomi.
After doing research in order to buy a new phone, I find it strange that Xaomi products are being suggested as an alternative to vendor anti-privacy and bloat.
MIUI is baked in and you need to register an account with Xaomi if you want to unlock your bootloader and put, say, LineageOS on your phone. Xaomi has a bootloader lockout period on their phones, during which you must wait and use MIUI for a period until your bootloader unlocks. They've increased that period from what was once a couple of weeks, to over a month on new models. That's plenty of time for Xaomi to harvest your data.
Meanwhile, there are other phones that allow you to unlock your bootloader without a data harvesting period.
A couple of months ago, I started getting notifications for random alibaba crap on my Xiaomi phone. Turns out, there's a system app which sends you ads as push notifs. Switched to iphone the next day, privacy is the killer feature.
I think you mean privacy, not security, which there aren't really any claims about.
Google aims to provide security updates to all Android devices, but specifically targets their product lines (Nexus, Pixel, etc) and Android One devices as they have a little more control over the software.
Mine downloaded them after initial setup. I simply cancelled the downloads of the crapware messaging apps that hadn't started and uninstalled the ones that had already downloaded.
Even though I am an extremely happy owner of a 5T, I won't buy another OnePlus device now that they have removed the headphone jack. That's the difficult part of voting with your wallet - your choices become more and more limited if the market isn't aligned with your personal preference.
Well said. I like small and light phones, not iOS. I'm typing this on an Xperia X Compact (2016). Follow up models weight more and maybe the product line will be discontinued. Even the iPhone SE is dead.
I got one off the kickstarter, and it's a neat little gadget. It hasn't fully replaced my main smartphone, but it's great for outdoors activities, or if I'm wearing an outfit without big pockets and don't want to carry a bag.
But then, how do people contact you? Anything tied to your phone number wouldn't work. Perhaps only Telegram, Skype, Messenger work cross device. Phone calls and WhatsApp don't.
Audio over Bluetooth has been one of the most consistently terrible user experiences I've encountered, and I used Linux as my daily driver in the early 00's.
I want to embrace the future. The more phones to get rid of the headphone jack, the more headphone companies will realize they need to make wireless versions.
That's like saying you want petrol stations to start closing down, so that manufacturers hurry up with electric cars. The logic is sound, but in the meantime it would be just bloody inconvenient to drive miles to a nearest petrol station while you still haven't got an electric car.
I want wireless headphones too, but I don't want to use adapters with my existing(and very expensive) headphones that I have right now. More importantly, having a headphone jack does not stop bluetooth headphones from working.
It would be nice if there were a way to deliver something resembling a quality audio to wireless headphones first. And a way to connect quality headphones to that magical wireless delivery system. Then you can get rid of a jack.
Be warned that Google does NOT push updates to these Android One phones, the OEM does, so they take their time and (potentially can) include as many crap apps as they want.
Xiaomi puts a lot of crapware in their Android One mobiles. They have their own line of apps, "Mi", and they include many of them pre-installed by default.
While I didn't have microsoft apps on my S9, if you install netguard (firewall) [1] you'll see that most samsung apps are constantly trying to get a connection with facebook servers and Samsung HQ.
Apps that have no reason to have internet connectivity, like the dialer, clock app, the finder (search functionality within the stock launcher) are phoning home [!] Unfortunately Samsung phones have locked bootloaders, so there's no easy way to 'take control'.
side note: I recommend installing this on all [un-rooted] android devices. It's an easy way to block most "telemetry" apps & devices collect, from the Amazon Firestick to apps running on any given device, including Google apps.
I'm often surprised by the number of totally valid reasons apps need to connect to the interwebs where you'd think they have no business. Clocks need to sync with time servers, dialers want to get updated lists of spam callers.. not sure what "finder" is but seems plausible that a search operation would need an index to search and even more reasonable that it be server-side. Not to mention reporting telemetry, analytics, errors etc so devs can improve the product. Not saying everyone's a good actor, but just connecting to a server doesn't make them a bad one.
I would understand if the clock was connecting to a dedicated service to sync the time, but the clock app is just an interface where I can set alarms, use stopwatch etc. The system time is managed (and synced) at the Android OS level and so there is no need for apps to connect to the internet, nor for it to have updates.
For the finder app, the index should be local. There is no way I want my apps, documents and file metadata to be sent to some samsung server to be indexed so that I can do a local search -- that would provide no value and it's also features that I've never asked for as a user.
The calls from most of these apps (especially samsung apps) to facebook servers also serve no purpose other than to try and datamine. I understand there may be cases where telemetry is valuable, but it's unacceptable to have apps (in many cases that haven't been opened) to try and connect to a remote server behind the scenes, especially when you cannot remove them easily.
Your “time” example is unfortunately problematic. You need to sync time with something external to the device. If not over the Internet, you’d need to sync via the cell network or GPS or something similar. No getting around it. Component manufactuters have not solved clock drift yet.
> The system time is managed (and synced) at the Android OS level and so there is no need for apps to connect to the internet, nor for it to have updates.
I don't understand how this is "problematic". I'm fine with Android being able to use NTP; I'm not fine with a clock app having internet access because it should just pull the time from the system.
I'm not surprised - every time I have Android devices (specifically Samsung) on my network, my pi-hole goes ballistic and the charts spike up noticeably. Those are all advertisement CDNs or telemetry. This does not happen with my hardware (all Linux or macOS/iOS).
>It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too...
Alas, it's true.
The crapware bloat has infested the entire industry. Sometimes I just don't understand? Don't some of these Samsung phones cost hundreds of dollars? Why annoy people who've already paid you with the crapware?
From software companies like Google and facebook, to hardware behemoths like Samsung, the entire industry has become addicted to this stuff.
Most people don't care. The money Samsung is getting from Facebook to pre-install the app is worth more to them than the goodwill they're losing from the minority of users who do care.
It is not just crapware, but adware too. When GDPR kicked in, I suddenly got a Foursquare consent dialog popping out of my standard Samsung Gallery app.
I still use that crap, unfortunately, but am looking for replacement for both mobile OS and smartphone (probably Fairphone with /e/ or LineageOS).
Most people don't care, or actually even enjoy those apps... They don't seem to care about anything at all that relates to phones.
E.g. I've told my relatives multiple times to send me good photos as document in messengers. But nope, 100KB compressed mush it is.
That's what's great about them. They definitely want to be perceived as premium brand, and installing crapware or selling off your data does not go well with that image. So they don't do it.
Yes, you can. You can also recompile the kernel with new options, or do whatever else. This has been misstated repeatedly in this thread, but macOS simply is not backed by a trusted hardware chain, end of story. It's not iOS. With SIP Apple has effectively implemented something like a more granular system immutable flag with kern.securelevel set to 1 like it was back until 10.3 or so (can't remember exactly when they changed it to 0), but just as you could drop down to single user mode back then SIP can also be disabled or modified at will. Having the restricted flag set on a bunch of core system .app bundles under macOS and a sane default policy is simply not the same thing as "you can't get rid of it". And I do think Apple should be legally required to provide decent built-in support for an owner controlled trust chain, but I don't think mixing up "you need to really know and be sure of what you're doing" with "it's hard prevented outside of bugs" is helpful.
>why annoy people who've already paid you with the crapware?
Why make money once when you can make it twice? Where's the incentive for businesses to give you what you want, when you can instead just take what they offer?
> Where's the incentive for businesses to give you what you want, when you can instead just take what they offer?
This is a symptom of short-term thinking in corporate leadership. Apple didn't become such a valuable brand by filling their products with third-party shit in exchange for a few bucks.
>Apple didn't become such a valuable brand by filling their products with third-party shit in exchange for a few bucks.
The same intransigence that serves them today also had them teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for the better part of a decade at one point.
Apple has that commitment to quality, but even aside from that commitment they also just have really good taste and its baked into their product design and company culture. As they say, money can't buy taste and there are no MBA programs that cultivate such sensibilities. It's a hard orientation to copy.
That's true up to a point. But chances are, they will eventually have corporate leadership that is desperate to make a profit, and they'll seriously consider doing the same thing.
If there is potential for a B2B deal for installing crapware in your device, it will be completed. The retail price of the device will increase as long it will not cause significant sales drop on significant markets. Free market, or rather - a corporate oligopoly.
My note 9 got preinstalled with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and LinkedIn. Is that what you call crapware?
I mean, I don't use LinkedIn nor OneDrive, and I only occasionally use the others, but these are high-quality pieces of software, you can completely disable these apps natively as well, they're not removed, but they don't impact the system in any way aside from taking up a small chunk of your memory.
I called it bloat, not crapware. I did so because I don't use OneDrive, Excel etc, but my phone won't allow me to uninstall them via the conventional way. By my definition that's bloat.
> they're not removed, but they don't impact the system in any way aside from taking up a small chunk of your memory
How are you defining "small"‽
I have Excel installed myself and it shows as 438MB. Word is smaller at 265MB, OneDrive is surprisingly chunky compared to that at 110MB.
I've not got PowerPoint installed and Play store doesn't seem to currently display space requirements of non-installed apps (which I'm sure it previously did).
That might be small on your 128Mb+ device (IIRC the Note 9 doesn't come in smaller variants) but if they are getting pre-installed on 64 or 32Mb devices too, that is more than enough to be a significant issue for users who don't particularly have use for them at all but who do want to use their storage for music/photos/video/... instead of unused apps.
AFAIK, disable apps don't use up any useful memory at all.
These apps sit in the system partition, which is read-only. If you root your phone, you can remount it read-write and remove them. However by doing so, integrity checks will fail. Also you won't be able to use that memory unless you repartition or put other apps there anyways.
The bad news is that if you update pre-installed apps, the original version will stay in the system partition doing nothing while you use the version you downloaded in the data partition.
It was a really big problem with early Android devices like the Nexus One (512 MB of storage).
It's probably worth distinguishing 'bloatware' from 'crapware', even if Wikipedia does consider them synonyms.
Roughly, I'd say that bloatware is anything preinstalled that's not filling a core use-case for the device, plus literally anything unremovable that isn't part of core functionality. So Messages isn't bloatware, but Messages+ and Samsung Health are. The first standard is sort of a fuzzy with general-purpose devices like computers and tablets, the second is pretty clearcut.
Crapware, to my mind, is "bloatware + shovelware". It's preinstalled stuff that's broken, malicious, redundant, or outside of standard use. Samsung Gallery is crappy, Superfish was malicious, VZ Navigator is basically a scam (paid, bad Google Maps), and the NFL app is worthless to a huge fraction of users.
The Office suite is very popular and highly functional, so I'd give it a pass if it could be uninstalled. Since it can't, it's bloatware. OneDrive is on the line; it's a popular complement to Office, but it's vendor-specific in a way that opening documents isn't. (Low-impact is not at all a defense; the 'disabled' state is nice for quick reinstalls, but there's no user-friendly argument for not allowing deletion.)
LinkedIn is absolutely crapware of the worst kind. It can't be uninstalled. It's irrelevant to a huge fraction of users (anyone who doesn't work). Its provided for the benefit of one company in a crowded space, whereas Office is a clear market leader. It's redundant functionality with a simple website, where Office is only partially duplicated by OpenOffice and Google Drive.
And worst of all? It actively hurts users. When LinkedIn lost its user data in 2012, the breach was made substantially worse because their iOs app scraped and uploader user data (including calendar info!) without permission. Permanently preinstalling an app that's largely useless and has already contributed to a major data breach is far outside what I consider acceptable behavior.
Apple also ships with a bunch of their apps that I would classify as crapware but unlike on Android I can't replace them as defaults with 3rf party apps of my choosing.
These also happen to coincide with the apps that you can't delete from your device. Apple refuses to give third-party developers access to sensitive APIs, such as those relating to the Phone app or SMS, due to the potential for abuse.
I think this is a valid criticism of stock android phones -- even ones sold directly by Google. But it's a slightly different criticism than the main crapware criticism here because FB is really a 3rd party.
I really do agree with your criticism though. People worry about FB's privacy issues, but then totally overlook all of Google's builtin privacy issues.
I never dove too deep into trying to uninstall undesirable apps from my android phones because I thought rooting a phone was necessary. But now seeing this, am curious to try it on a few old phones that i use as podcast/mp3 playing devices while mowing the lawn, etc. Thanks for sharing this!
Isn't this just the same as disabling them from the apps interface or does it physically remove it from the system partition?
There is however one I can't disable in my sony phone (what's new) and even if I've managed to completely silence it I'd like to try with this method. Maybe it can do it even if the UI doesn't want to :)
From some googling it doesn't appear that you are actually physically removing the app, from xda-developers:
these uninstalled system applications can/will come back after a factory reset.
This is a good thing, however, as it means that these applications truly aren’t being uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user (user 0 is the default/main user of the phone). That’s why, if you omit the “–user 0” and “-k” part of the command, the command won’t work. These two commands respectively specify that the system app will only be uninstalled for the current user (and not all users, which is something that requires root access) and that the cache/data of the system application will be preserved (which can’t be removed without root access). Therefore, even if you “uninstall” a system application using this method, you can still receive official OTA updates from your carrier or OEM. [0]
If you have to insist on getting an Android device, why not just stick with Google? Is it because of the lack of public awareness that this doesn't happen on Google devices? or does it happen as well?
No, at least not through the official Android Play store.
I don't know about the other application stores such as Samsung's 'Galaxy Apps' store, which is particularly intrusive. It is known for auto-installing apps even if you didn't ask for it. The best solution would be to delete Galaxy Apps store itself. Unless you use it voluntarily of course, but who does?
I have an s8 on the table next to me collecting dust over issues like that. If only they would let you unlock the bootloader for a lineage install it would be a good phone.
Oh, I just spent a lot of time trying to root a phone just to get rid of Wiko's constantly nagging "helper" tool and failed. I'll now try this for sure!
I spend a lot less time (zero time most likely) in Apple’s products dealing with malware, except for that time they added that music album for some stupid reason.
Whatever Microsoft stuff was on there was probably added by the carrier. I purchased an unlocked S9 directly from Samsung and it did not have any Microsoft apps.
When buying a new phone I always spend some time deleting all Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and carrier related apps. Yes, you can delete 'undeletable' apps through ADB, without rooting the device.