> Today, because of Android, a typical phone comes preloaded with as many as 40 apps from multiple developers, not just the company you bought the phone from. If you prefer other apps—or browsers, or search engines—to the preloaded ones, you can easily disable or delete them, and choose other apps instead, including apps made by some of the 1.6 million Europeans who make a living as app developers.
"Easily disable or delete"? Not to mention the lack of deletion on a lot of these (...any? I don't recall if I've seen any with deletion), I don't always even find a hard way to disable or delete preinstalled apps on phones... unless we're talking about booting custom bootloaders and wiping your phone etc.
[1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/andro...
Gear icon -> Apps -> select a preinstalled app, you have options to "Disable" and to "Force stop" the app.
What you can't is to remove the app and reclaim the storage it's taking.
At least so it looks on an un-rooted Sony phone running Android 7.0 that I have before me.
When these are "disabled" all that remains on the device is a pointer to the app store in a disabled state. It's a few KB of data, and in my opinion a fantastic trade-off to actually allowing deletion then not being able to "factory reset" since that data is no longer on the device.
I hate that this shovelware is on my phone in any form, and it makes me regret buying a non-ROMmable phone in the first place.
But I should have been more clear. not all preinstalled apps are like this, just a lot of the less important ones (at least on google-branded phones, I have no idea what samsung or lg are doing to facebook). I believe it does require the developer of the app to actually implement it though.
But either way there is literally no benefit to removing those apps from the system partition. You won't get the space back (different partition), and if they allow users to delete these things they can very easily get their phone into a state that you can't recover from (factory reset won't work because there's nothing to reset to).
I'm 100% with you that non-essential apps should be uninstallable as much as possible, and preferably I'd like them to not be installed at all, but that's an entirely different issue than what Google was just fined for.
At the end of the day, i MUCH prefer Android's handling of removing/disabling factory installed apps over something like MacOS where if you "factory reset" the device, you can't use it again until you connect to a network and re-download the entire image.
Few Android users will ever experience a Google branded phone, mainly due to price and availability. I personally will never buy one after my friend's Pixel 2 XL started smoking, though that is her third failed Google phone. I joked that she should put it on the stack next to her Nexus 5X (defective solder joints) and OG Pixel (died of another hardware defect), but she shipped it back and is on week 3 of waiting to get the sucker back.
Comparatively, I've only ever seen one LG phone smoke that way, and an RMA request later I had an overnight shipping label and a new phone 2 days later. Wireless charging still worked in the meantime :P
I don't mind a button that does that, but when the name is "factory reset", it's literally supposed to reset the phone to what it was like coming out of the factory, which includes whatever they bundled with it.
I completely agree, but that's not what this fine is about, and even the definition of what is "shovelware" is different for each person (I'd be annoyed if a browser wasn't installed by default).
Ironically what this fine is about will make it HARDER for Google to prevent shovelware (that's not theirs) from being included on the phone, because they can't threaten to take away access to the play store any more. So now Samsung is free to load up the bullshit onto the system partition and Google can't do much to stop them (or at least the bargaining chip that they were using is no longer an option).
For the record, I'm not against this EU decision, but I do have my issues with it.
It stands to reason that all Google would have to do is pay them, and the same result will still happen (unless this decision means that Google literally can't do that since they are in a dominant position, i'm not a lawyer so I don't know).
Overall I think we want the same stuff. More competition, less preinstalled shit, and a healthier ecosystem. However we disagree on how to get there. I personally think Android is heading the right direction. It's always been pretty simple to replace everything but the settings view with your own alternatives after install (hell, even the system web view can be swapped out, and IIRC Mozilla has been working on getting Firefox in a position so it can be the default web view on android if you want), and I agree that Google could be forced to do more in this space (a "select your browser from these 5 choices" is a good compromise, but I'd be pissed if I had to do that for my phone, messages, browser, email client, homescreen, etc... on every device i'd be annoyed. Not to mention that many people expect a Google phone to work well, and will go to Google when it doesn't. If my phone app stops working and I didn't choose the Google phone app, they now need to field calls from users who don't know Google can't do anything to fix it).
Disagree. It's nice for the technically-inclined but terrible for everyone else.
It's scummy that carriers get paid to shovel this crap on, but I'd think many consumers expect some of these apps and suffer without them. They just want their phones "to work."
Maybe they could figure it out with some help but I'm certain that's frustrating for many consumers regardless.
Two different arguments here honestly. Apps should never be permanently embedded.
I've never seen this. Just about every preinstalled app on the phones I've had are the actual app.
Also, even when I try disabling some of these built-in Google apps that I supposedly can disable, I get a prompt warning me that "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave"... you can't keep a straight face telling a user "oh but you can easily disable this!" when you yourself are telling them the consequence is that it might break other things on their phone. (!)
You basically have to root the phone to remove a lot of the Google/vendor bloatware.
It's literally a single button press to get back 100% of the space possible, and it's the button called "disable" right in front at the top of the app's info section.
They probably should just lie and rename the button to uninstall. That's basically what it is.
The only difference is a factory reset will restore it.
No, it isn't. That's why they call it "disable" and not "delete".
So factory reset should show a view of select your appstore (Google, F-Droid, etc). Once that's installed you're ready to go.
You could remove the app from the system while keeping it in the restoration image. Same way as how you can uninstall PC crapware when you buy a new one but it's still in the image in the recovery partition should you choose to factory reset.
Removing that app from the system partition won't give you more usable space without repartitioning, and it will now mean that you can't factory reset the phone.
They even (ab)use this to make seamless updates by creating a second /system partition, writing the update to that, then swapping over on next restart. If something goes wrong, they swap back to the first system partition.
In this manner, the /system partition is NEVER written to outside of creation.
Rooting is literally sidestepping this entire process to take full control over the system and mount /system as writable. Sure, you could probably make a /recovery, /system, and /data all different partitions, but now you are roughly doubling the amount of system data on the disk for not much of a reason.
Rooting is very much using the system as designed. Google supports it and provides tools to enable it. Some apps on the Play Store require it. Does that mean everyone should root? No. Does this have any bearing on the fact that the recovery image should not be modified when rooting? No.
> They even (ab)use this to make seamless updates by creating a second /system partition, writing the update to that, then swapping over on next restart. If something goes wrong, they swap back to the first system partition.
If Google could provide a better way to root then this wouldn't be an issue. That they provide a suboptimal method isn't a defense here.
> In a normal Android system /system is read only unless mounted otherwise (which only really happens during updates).
I like how you contradict yourself in the span of 2 comments. First you said "Removing that app from the system partition won't give you more usable space without repartitioning", now you say that space is usable for installing updates. You just refuted your own point.
> In this manner, the /system partition is NEVER written to outside of creation.
In other manners, it IS written to outside of creation, and this is clearly due to the way they designed the system, not because modifying /system should actually alter the recovery image.
> Rooting is literally sidestepping this entire process to take full control over the system and mount /system as writable.
Yes, that's what it is, because it's necessary for some apps to be able to do what they do. The fact that they don't provide a better mechanism isn't a defense for the consequences of providing a poor mechanism.
> Sure, you could probably make a /recovery, /system, and /data all different partitions, but now you are roughly doubling the amount of data on the disk for not much of a reason.
That it's "not much of a reason" is very much your quite-subjective opinion. And there are better solutions than what you proposed here. And PCs already do this. But at this point you're changing the subject -- a reduction in space usage would not make your claim that "that's literally what disabling it does" any more true. It's simply false.
By your line of reasoning Google has apps that don't work when rooted, so therefore they shouldn't allow it at all.
And i'm not contradicting or refuting myself, there are (oversimplified) 2 system partitions on Android when setup this way. It's a tradeoff they made and you can read more about the pros and cons at [0].
This is getting a bit aggressive for my tastes so this is probably my last reply, but the point i was trying to make is that most of android is designed around the fact that /system is read only and doesn't change (which is also a nice security buffer), and /data is where all user data sits, and to "factory reset" they wipe /data and nothing else.
It's absolutely a trade off to have /system do double duty like that, but one that I think most people are more than happy with as the most common complaint about the system is that people can't delete "system" apps entirely. And creating a 3rd copy of those apps on /recovery so they could be deleted from /system and /user isn't really "solving" the problem, just moving it back a little, while using up a LOT more space on the user's device.
The vast majority of the Android market, in the US at least I can assure you, has google or carrier based spyware that you can't delete or disable.
[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16418170/google-pixel-marke...
But sure, in a mass market setting, I don't find it at all surprising that you wouldn't be allowed to disable Settings.
FWIW, I too hate that there isn't a replacement for those Play Services. I'm so frustrated - Pixel launcher will not show temperature in Celsius unless I give it "Web and App Activity" permission.
This is pretty surprising - what locale are you using?
Temperature units preference is saved in Google Search app. Pixel launcher, even though it shows the news cards from Search app, cannot show temperature in the units of my choice unless I give it the "Web and App activity" permission. Just Google things.
Isn't that literally the point? When the complaint is that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving few viable alternative options, the fact that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving fewer alternative options is more like an admission rather than a defense...
To make this viable, at a minimum, it should be possible to search for apps that don't depend on Play Services, so you could remove most of your apps and replace them with alternatives.
But I expect most users wouldn't do this, and so there is little incentive for most apps to stop depending on Play Services. The only real incentive to do it is to be able to publish the app on Amazon.
https://developer.amazon.com/docs/fire-tv/fire-os-overview.h...
While it is not (can be removed/replaced, the limitations preventing to do that are completely artificial and this is probably playing a good role in what has been judged), and even if it was, things should have been bundled differently to begin with (if they can't, that can be considered a conscious decision potentially motivated by a desire to abuse a monopoly, so in all cases that should be redesigned)
So it's mostly same cause/same effects from an high level overview -- and I'm not surprised. Maybe the way to become compliant (after their pointless whining phase has passed) will even be similar? I'm not buying the business model argument. Google browser, play store and so over are now extremely well established and won't be abandoned by any kind of mass exodus any time soon. In ten years, they can be challenged, but that's the fucking POINT: practical competition should be allowed.
It's astonishing that everybody and their dog was scandalized by MS behavior in the time (and some even are today, despite present MS being quite different from the old one), while Google has somehow managed to be considered friendly regardless of the doing exactly the same shit, if not worse, while simultaneously even pretending that they are not evil. Well maybe evil is a strong word, and I can concede that they did not pretend they are not hypocrites :p
Other thing is, if every OEM starts writing their own API for these services, app developers will have to write apps for each OEM because they for sure will not work with each other. We will go back to the days of Symbian where apps will come with a huge list of phones it is known to work with.
- Youtube
- Hacker News
- XDA-Developers
- Amazon
- My banking app
Pretty much all of those could just be a tab in my browser, but the convenience of properly-formatted text, easy searching, replying, etc pulls one towards the native app.
You can change defaults and sideload apps on android, which makes it much more permissible than the rest of maker i.e iOS.
Maybe there are bots who install and then uninstall many apps. Those used to be fairly prevalent.
I just counted, and I have 128 apps on my Android phone (none are games). Some of those were pre-installed, but I installed the vast majority of them.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is something where iOS & Android users are opposite one another: iPhones are smart phones, whereas Android phones are computers with calling capabilities. The whole point of iOS is to communicate; the whole point of Android is to be a computer which fits in your pocket.
Did they object to my thought on iOS versus Android? Why? Do they think that an iPhone is a computer with calling capabilities? Do they think that Android phones are smart phones?
I'd really like to know what offended folks so much that three folks (at least) downvoted, and offended them so much they didn't even bother posting.
I'm not complaining about the downvotes, just genuinely curious what could possibly have been controversial.
You cannot remove the pre-installed apps, in my experience, only the subsequent updates to those apps.