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:Thank God!

[Anonymous Coward]

Android lets you disable preinstalled apps. This won't uninstall it and give you space back but it will at least disable the app from running, uninstall any updates for it beyond the original base app, and disable update for it all together.

Not perfect and annoying having to do it one by one, but it is better then nothing.

Re:Easy solution, albeit a 'free market' one...

[Chatsubo]

One little problem with this: I bought a Samsung and it has been installing tons of unremovable bloatware ever since. The stuff was not all there at the start.

It's not like there was a sticker on the box saying "Comes with 50 mandatory apps, will install 50 more once you've paid" either. I'd read a ton of reviews and still had no idea about the extent of the iron-fist they take over your device.

And yes, there's no way I'm buying another Samsung ever again, so whether this changes anything is largely immaterial to me.

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.