Bloatware and carrier phones: name a more iconic duo. The number of preinstalled apps on some smartphones has grown so much these days that people still come to our forums to flash stock Android builds to get rid of the bloat. Bloatware is often preloaded on smartphones by carriers or even smartphone manufacturers themselves. They are often annoying services you will probably never use but you probably can’t uninstall, either. Since carrier devices are often fairly locked down, most users can’t get rid of these unwanted apps without mucking around with ADB. Thankfully, the European Union has a plan: It wants to force smartphone manufacturers to let users uninstall the bloatware that comes preloaded on these devices, according to the Financial Times.
This measure is part of a much broader act aimed at reducing the power of big technology companies, especially when it comes to the use of advertising data and platform owners’ power over companies doing business on said platforms. I hope this gets passed, since using ADB to remove bloatware can get a little tedious.
My biggest problem isn’t that it’s there, it’s that it’s side loaded and updated through it’s own separate, secret system. Only being able to “disable” it isn’t great, but the side stepping the android store of any App connected to Facebook seems to be a truck sized security hole.
Survey says…
Windows and blue screens.
Windows and malware.
Windows and x86.
Intel and Windows.
Intel and hardware security holes.
Media companies and draconian DRM.
Commercial software and no Linux support.
BeOS and the future we lost.
Sun and Unix.
Sun and Sparc.
IBM and the Power ISA.
Apple and PowerPC.
Sun and tech that doesn’t make them any money.
Oracle and greed.
Gamers and regressive politics.
Facebook and right wing propaganda.
Most Linux users and their love for MS.
FOSS advocates and “M$”.
OpenBSD and Security.
Lennart Poettering and bad ideas.
i’d disagree on the last one. side effect of systemd development are multiple of modifications to kernel and linux userspace that benefit also non-systemd users.
and i cannot imagine life without pulseaudio. anyone with a bluetooth headset might tell you that.
[email protected],
I must disagree. It could have been nice to have a modern standard multiplatform boot environment across all flavors of unix, but systemd is not the answer because it is too linux specific. It created tight coupling and dependencies that can make things more difficult for non-systemd users.
You can use /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf, which is the system-wide file, or ~/.asoundrc, which is your local file.
It has worked very well for me for a very long time. I have no need at all for PulseAudio nor systemd.
> side effect of systemd development are multiple of modifications to kernel and linux userspace that benefit also non-systemd users.
You mean like the kdbus fiasco? Or all the software that now refuses to operate unless yo’re using systemd or faking it very accurately despite not actually _needing_ it for anything? Or all the projects that it’s absorbed which people have had to fork because they provided important functionality for everyone and don’t _actually_ need systemd for anything?
Yes, there have been some benefits overall (though many of them are cases of systemd listening to demand for specific features when other projects wouldn’t and those other projects playing catch-up to provide equivalent feature sets (log sealing anybody?), but it’s also caused a huge amount of fallout that has had a very negative impact on users and developers and it’s made a number of very questionable design choices that many people think are now the correct way to do things but in reality cause all kinds of problems.
> pulseaudio
You mean the project that actively discussed the possibility of using a message oriented low bandwidth IPC mechanism that isn’t capable of isochronous streaming and has inherently variable latency for streaming audio (no, seriously, they were actively considering using DBus as an audio transport)? The one that audiophiles avoid at all costs because it can’t do basic stuff like bit-perfect playback or reliable N:M routing? The one that resamples audio in software even if the hardware supports resampling at a higher accuracy?
The idea behind Pulseaudio is laudable, but there are so many issues with implementation that it borders on unusable for a lot of people. There’s a very good reason that any Linux system built for actual multimedia work uses JACK, not Pulsaudio.
Systemd works well as a desktop init, and that’s where it’s real value is. It’s value proposition is much more iffy on the server side.
What are your thoughts on Pipewire (https://pipewire.org/)? It’s supposed to addresss the problems with Pulseaudio and consolidate the Linux audio/video landscape.
Systemd was developed for servers in mind initially (infrastructure deployment).
> Intel and hardware security holes.
After the whole credit crisis, which was a big “shame on you” event for bankers, this was the one that made me think “shame on us IT folks”. Fixing it probably takes at least 3 to 5 years, but it all got wiped under the rug so very quickly…
Speaking of bloatware, I also view an unlinking of the package management from the shopping application as essential. Shops should not be included on devices by default.
But that crapware is now the main business model of many industries. Take the smart TV business. Their price has never been so low, in case you do not know. Why? Because now they are massively collecting user data and it has become the main reason why you can get literally years of updates support on your TV.
A random reference: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/02/07/smart-tv-tracking-features-how-turn-them-off-if-you-want-some-privacy/315277002/
The article has a hard paywall. Does anybody have a link to a non-paywalled source?
There’s a typo in the OP.
It reads: “name a more iconic duo.”
When it should said: “name [it] a moronic duo.”
Do first-party applications one never used also count as bloatware? I’d love to get rid of the ton of pre-loaded apps – both on Android and iOS – for which I have no use.
IMO I have never come across true bloatware that cannot be disabled from the app settings. Most of the apps you can’t disable are system UI enhancements, which I personally find desirable compared to the barebones Vanilla Android.
The apps which can be disabled but not uninstalled is exactly what this is about. Some people find them useful, and other people would like to remove them. I have a Motorola Android phone for testing apps, and it has some stupid security suite I can’t get rid of, Motorola services, and some other junk I can’t get rid of. It’s a 16GB phone, so I need the space those take up.
You know that these apps are in the immutable system partition and as a result you won’t get free any space back even if you “uninstall” them, right?
So what you are essentially asking is for a mutable system partition, which would make factory reset impossible without re-flashing the device using a PC.
kurkosdr,
That’s exactly the problem, the system space is for critical applications. Bloatware does not deserve to be installed permanently taking away space from the user. Bloatware should be deleteable. if the vendor wants to provide links so the user can easily reinstall it, that’s fine, but forcing users to keep the bloatware installed goes too far.
Hmmm What would it take for me to move from the USA to The Netherlands and gain citizenship?
Reading about this, it sounds more like a favor to EU industry more than consumers.