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'Bloatware' Becoming a Problem On Android Phones
elrous0 writes "According to a recent article in Wired, consumers of many new Android devices (including Samsung's Vibrant and HTC's EVO) are complaining about the increasing presence of something that has plagued consumer PC's for years: Bloatware (or, to use the more kind euphemism, 'Pre-installed software' that the computer manufacturer gets paid to include on a new PC). Unfortunately the bloatware (aka 'crapware') that comes with these phones has a nasty quality not found on even the most bloated PC: it can't be removed. Many angry consumers have begun to complain openly about this disturbing trend."
NASCAR!!!!! Argh!
Guess that'll teach ya to buy GSM only and direct from the manufacturer.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I always thought pre-installed crap was called "shovelware." As in, it's shoveled on there not for functionality's sake, but so some programmer can get a bonus.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I thought android was the "Open" one...
Crapware is stuff that is installed by the device manufacturer, usually in exchange for money (although in Android's case possibly so Google can get advertising money later), which is not required by the user and consumes resources. Bloatware is software that does something useful, but does so in a very inefficient way, typically including a large number of superfluous features. They are not the same thing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Economists:
Is this an issue that the free market should settle (i.e. If you don't want bloatware, research your phone and reward another company with your funds)?
Is this an issue that regulation should settle (something about property rights? selling what some would call a defective product? fraud?)
Discuss.
The horrible thing about Android is that phone makers can do anything they want with it.
“It’s different from phone to phone and operator to operator,” says Keith Nowak, spokesman for HTC. “But in general, the apps are put there to meet the operator’s business and revenue needs.”
Nowak must be new to PR. He was supposed to spin it as "free apps, everybody wins!" But instead he handed out a healthy dosage of the truth. Enjoy it, it rarely happens.
My work here is dung.
Apple doesn't install said Fart apps. rather the end users choose to. Not so with bloatware...
I had to reimage my father's PC, a 2005 Dell, using the built-in system restore feature. Now he has AOL and Norton that is seriously out of date!!! This stuff never dies. It took another 30 minutes for me to remove all the crap and put on newer versions of other crap.
Even custom ROMs suffer from this a bit. Whatever the author of the ROM thinks is a good application your stuck with. The only way I've been able to get a slim down ROM from my Droid is by downloading a ROM and customizing it myself.
Shovelware, Bloatware, Crapware, pre-installed software, Windows Vista,
they're all interchangable really.
Bloatware is when the user bought a fart app, which also queefs.
It is exactly for reasons like this we should support truly open platforms for mobiles instead of "open" like android. I am really happy with my N900 and I hope MeeGo will be a huge success.
This applies to most phones sold by carriers. Prior to purchasing my Nexus One I had a Blackberry (and the one before it) Both had lots of T-Mobile crap on them that I never used. The good thing about Blackberry though is it allowed me to "hide" any apps I didn't want to see.
I suppose in Android I just wouldn't put them on any of my multiple desktops and just leave them in the main app list. (if thats possible on those phones)
My problem with this is security. Every single one of those pre-installed applications have bugs in them that could be exploited by malware. For me, that's what makes it so irritating. An app, that I don't want, is taking up space, and makes my data less secure.
It's sad how the open platform gets saddled with crap you can't remove and the closed platform (iPhone) is kept clean by a CEO who gives a shit about aesthetics and user experience.
I remember the good old days when Android fans made fun of the iPhone because some people did a jailbreak to install software, now those same people have to jailbreak their phones to be able to uninstall some software. Oh the irony.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Bloatware used to refer to software that at one time actually was useful. Then they start adding more and more features that also makes the software slower, more buggy, less reliable, etc. Basically it was another way of saying that it's software affected by feeping creaturism.
Vista is bloatware.
The shovelware, crapware, spyware, malware, etc. are what can come with it when you buy it as part of an OEM package.
no, it doesn't.
On my EVO, I have never used FM Radio or Music, yet both are running in the background after booting.
Clearly, not using them doesn't mean they don't run and consume resources.
It sounds like you need to sit down with your father and have "the talk." Fortunately, now days you are not alone, and there are plenty of useful web sites to help you through this difficult discussion. One such site can be found here. While it may be a little uncomfortable and possibly a bit embarrassing at first, you will find that he may keep an open mind and be willing to share some of his fears and views on this sensitive but important topic.
Very few phones do not work this way and as a number of Apple people say about the closed store geeks get worked up over - few real users are going to care (and in this case I think it is true, in the case of Apple regular people *are* aware of how closed the app store is and are starting to see apps for the Androids that they will never get because of it).
If you do not want them on your desktop simply press and hold the icon until it "locks" to your finger and drag it to the trash can. It will still be in your list of installed applications (and you will see it when you bring up your app screen) but other than a small amount of storage it doesn't take up anything. They could, of course, at some point force loading of it and have annoying op-up adds but then that *would* be noticed and cared about by pretty much everyone. Heck most do not care if they are eat up with them on the PC to the point their computer slows to a crawl. These applications do not start up in the background (though ones that are widgets will until you remove the widget) so it isn't like they affect anything other than seeing the icon in you full app listing.
Even in the link form the main article only a VERY small handful of people care more than a "I wish it were not so" (which would be my attitude) and currently all but one person realizes that they can't go someplace else to get away from it (the one posts solution - an iPhone - has applications one pretty much *must* use even if they do not want too, can we say iTunes for interfacing with my phone? Yea, there is where you go for an open extensible phone that doesn't force you into doing something in ways you do not want).
Of course this is what happens when an Open platform is picked up by business - freedom to do what you want with it means you can make choices others do not like. It isn't freedom if you tell me what I have to do with it. Android is Open and this is why you will see a range from mostly stock (Nexus One and Motorola Droid) to highly modified (Motorola Droid-X and much of the HTC offerings). Most of them can be rooted and your own custom ROM installed - but even most of those are "customized" with applications the ROM developer thought were good ideas. Not to mention the Droid-X has been rooted already, time will tell if they can get around the boot-loader issue or not.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I've been considering getting a smartphone recently and one of the things that turned me off from Android phones was all the reports of bloatware. And some carriers, like AT&T, don't even allow the user to delete that crap. The HTC Aria, for example, is stuck with 4 or 5 different AT&T navigation applications, in addition to the one provided by Google. People have managed to hack the phone and are providing clean installs. Years ago I might have done that, but nowadays I don't have the time or patience to deal with that sort of thing.
This kind of crap automatically leaves me seriously considering an iPhone. Why in the hell is a company like Apple more successful in keeping bloatware off their phones? Why are Google and Microsoft incapable of demanding their products be free of this stuff? It's in their best interests.
I want something designed well, that just works without and doesn't require me screwing around with the device to get it just right. And this is coming from someone who used to spend a lot of time obsessing over getting icons and tools set up just right. I've designed my own themes for Windows and even found an application that let me create unique themes for my old Sony Ericsson. I like some level of customization but if things are design properly the need for it is diminished.
It's bad enough having to go through and delete junk that's installing only to try to convince me to waste my money. It's offensive that I can't even remove that crap from the phone.
For now I'm not getting any smartphone. I'll wait to see how things play out. A regular old phone does the job just fine and I'm in front of a computer all day anyway/
My friend got an iPhones, and it had some stupid application for making phone calls! Phone calls! How 20th century! Who the heck does that anymore? Sheesh, I tells ya, sheesh!
From the article... "The record figure for a single month was reported as T$18 billion which is roughly $570 million for the month of April and thus reflects..."
I'm guessing that's Taiwanese Dollars, not the US kind that Apple reports in. In USD it would make it about 1.7 billion per quarter to Apple's 10.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
$0.57B is waaay less than $10B/3...
If you *really* want to see how Apple is blowing away the competition, look here for a graph of Apple profit vs the combination of {RIM, Motorola, Nokia, HTC, Sony Ericsson}... Now Samsung and LG aren't part of the group Apple is compared against on the graph, but when you're making huge amounts more *profit* (not revenue as you quote above) than a significant number of your competitors *combined*, you're doing something right.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
When I first got my EVO i bought into this. Then I downloaded SystemPanel:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel
At the time all the features of the pay version were in the unlocked version. So I got to play around with the profiling features. I have since paid for the app.
This is what I discovered. The Sprint apps don't do jack if you never use them. The only app that actually runs despite me having no need for it is the voicemail app because I don't use Sprint's voicemail.
What people don't understand is that Android loads applications into memory on the idea that you might use them. Which applications it thinks you might use is based on what you actually use. So when you first get the phone and it doesn't have any history and not many applications loaded on it. There's a very good chance that the Sprint apps are going to be the ones getting cached. The cached apps use no CPU time. They're just in memory in case you decide to run them.
I've stopped using a task killer, my battery time hasn't gotten worse. Nothing about my phone has really changed.
In short, yeah it sucks you can't remove those apps and they're taking up space, but they're not hurting performance. They're not even running unless you run them.
See also this explanation from the developer of the SystemPanel app as to why automated task killing is a bad idea:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel/doc/autokill