South Korea Rules Pre-Installed Phone Bloatware Must Be Deletable (zdnet.com)

New industry guidelines in South Korea will allow smartphone users the option of deleting unnecessary pre-installed bloatware. "The move aims to rectify an abnormal practice that causes inconvenience to smartphone users and causes unfair competition among industry players," said the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, in a press release. ZDNet reports: The measure will also help give users more data storage and improve battery life, said the ministry. Under the new guidelines, telcos are required to make most of their pre-installed apps deletable except for four necessary items related to Wi-Fi connectivity, near-field communication (NFC), the customer service center and the app store.

Comments

Re: Google probably lobbied for app store exemptio

[wierd_w]

Granny wont be the one doing the fixing. That's "what she has you for, dear."

Since it is you that needs to know, why bother telling her?

Just turn on developer mode, plug in the damn cable, do the one liner from the console, and stop being a bitch about it. :P

In case you were wondering, it's

abd install [somefile.apk]

AND-- if you want to back up all of granny's stuff, modern android versions support a backup operation, so you can back up all of granny's apps and their associated private data too, and restore it just as easily. (so when she deletes everything and corks up her phone, you can just restore everything and say fuckit.)

See this handy little article for details.

https://9to5google.com/2017/11...

Re:That means you can even delete the dialer

[Gavagai80]

It explicitly does not mean that. It means "except for four necessary items related to Wi-Fi connectivity, near-field communication (NFC), the customer service center and the app store." Basically, boatware is anything that doesn't need to be on a restore image to make the phone immediately functional and allow convenient re-installation of desired apps.