I tried a OnePlus once (OnePlus 7T in 2020). I thought at that time OnePlus was supposed to be free of bloatware, a pure Android experience.

However it did some annoying thing with any app that it considers to be a game. Whenever opening a game it'd pop up some message how it "optimized" the game (whatever that meant), and it also had some unremovable game center app (forgot exact name).

I didn't want those popup messages nor that game center thing, but there was no way to disable it, there was only some complicated way of disabling it individually for every specific game which it could also forget after updates.

So if OnePlus was supposed to be bloatware free, nope, not at all, comes with annoying things that can't be disabled.

Nexus and Pixel are the only bloatware-free Android phones I've seen.

I wouldn't call a feature bloatware. I understand your grievance but to me bloatware it's third party apps, not components of the OS.

Its definetly bloatware, regardless of who put it in

By that logic, Apple is the worst offender of the bunch.

Well, I mean, yes.

I always thought only vendors can put in bloatware - it comes non-optional per default. Who apart from the software vendor could be responsible?

I think it agree. Bloatware is always installed by the vendor but is usually third-party software.

I think the key definition for me is if it is part of the "system" it isn't bloatware. Bloatware is something that is unnecessary added on. Especially if it could be added in by a third party, for example pre-installed Facebook apps.

Of course the system isn't a well defined concept. In the example about I think the "optimizer" feels like system whereas the game center feels like bloatware.

True. BatteryLifeWare?

Your link doesn't match what you are saying.

Your link talked about a phone throttling popular apps which were marked as battery hogs to help conserve battery life.

>In testing, I had encountered something which really perplexed me, and caught my attention; seemingly inexplicable slow browser benchmark figures which were not in line with any other Snapdragon 888 device in the market, getting only a fraction of the scores and performance of other devices.

We have detected that OnePlus is blacklisting popular applications away from the its fastest cores, causing slow down in typical workloads such as web browsing. We have confirmed that (a) benchmarks or (b) unknown apps get full performance; most of the top popular non-benchmark apps get notably reduced performance. This is perhaps to improve battery life at the expense of performance, but it does mean that the regular benchmark results are somewhat useless for user experience.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-e...

There is a difference between benchmark apps being meaningless and cheating in benchmark apps.

For example one HN user told a story of a magazine who benchmarked different compilers including this user's. This user's compiler recognized the benchmark code was dead code and just eliminated it where other compilers didn't. This magazine called him out for cheating and it hurt sales for his compiler. He didn't mean to cheat the benchmark. It's just that the benchmark being used in an outdated methodology for evaluating performance.

In this case, Samsung is not only cheating on battery life testing, but also cheating on performance benchmarks.

>The only sensible rationale for such a decision is to improve a device’s power efficiency and battery life.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-e...

>John Poole, the lead developer of Geekbench, was able to reproduce the wild performance changes based on whether the S22 thought it was running a benchmark or a game. Poole changed Geekbench's package name to that of Genshin Impact, a popular game, and saw benchmark scores plummet. The Snapdragon Galaxy S22 dropped its single-core score 46 percent

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/samsung-caught-throt...

I don't feel this is cheating. Sure, I agree there could have been more transparency, but I don't think this amounts to cheating.

If Samsung had used this performance limiting feature during testing, and then released phones that didn't have it still citing the better battery numbers, then yes that would be cheating.

That's not what's happening here.

Is Intel cheating too because their processors can allocate tasks to more performant or efficient cores?

Is Intel cheating because they can exceed the TDP ratings when thermal and power constraints allow it?

When Volkswagen and other automakers applied different software to cars that were being emissions tested and ones that are driving on the road, that is cheating.

This is different imo.

Slowing down all well known programs except benchmarks can't possibly be anything else but cheating.

Depends how you look at it. What can't be denied is that they removed the performance limitations for benchmarking apps and this is the real issue - you don't get that kind of performance in real life usage.

It sounded like different apps were throttled different amounts which means that you need to measure the performance of different apps separately. If you wanted to throttle a benchmark, what level of throttling should it get?