Samsung Faces Lawsuit In China Over Smartphone Bloatware

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung is being sued in China for installing too many apps onto its smartphones. The Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission is also suing Chinese vendor Oppo, demanding that the industry do more to rein in bloatware. The group said complaints are on the rise from smartphone users who are frustrated that these apps take up too much storage and download data without the user being aware. Out of a study of 20 smartphones, Samsung and Oppo were found to be the worst culprits. A model of Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 contained 44 pre-installed apps that could not be removed from the device, while Oppo's X9007 phone had 71.

Comments

Thank God!

[war4peace]

My S4 Mini has a crapton of preinstalled, irremovable apps I have no use for, nor do I intend to ever use.
The worst thing was that there was some "update available" for some apps which required more rights and I never agreed to those updates, and I thought they would remain "stuck" on an older version. They didn't. After a few months I saw they got updated on my phone without me approving anything.
TripAdvisor, looking at you!

Re:Don't really understand.

[gnupun]

And if these apps are useful why not offer free downloads from the play store instead of preinstalling them and making them non-removable? Samsung must be getting paid by software vendors to install these apps or the apps are free and Samsung is selling data collected by these apps.

You're not forced to buy a samsung phone.

That's no excuse to install something useless that wastes flash memory and RAM.

Pre-installed Malware on Chinese phones & tabl

[xiando]

Bought a Q8H tablet from China & discovered that it came delivered with two types of very malicious malware (Trojan.coudw.a and another) built right into the factor ROM. If you remove it and do a factory reset then you get it back because it's right there in the NAND recovery image. Perhaps the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission could look into that since it appears to be a rather common problem.