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".
> 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...