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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'd say this is wrong. His direct quote is [1]:

> Today, because of Android, a typical phone comes preloaded with as many as 40 apps from multiple developers, not just the company you bought the phone from. If you prefer other apps—or browsers, or search engines—to the preloaded ones, you can easily disable or delete them, and choose other apps instead, including apps made by some of the 1.6 million Europeans who make a living as app developers.

"Easily disable or delete"? Not to mention the lack of deletion on a lot of these (...any? I don't recall if I've seen any with deletion), I don't always even find a hard way to disable or delete preinstalled apps on phones... unless we're talking about booting custom bootloaders and wiping your phone etc.

[1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/andro...

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You sure can disable preinstalled apps.

Gear icon -> Apps -> select a preinstalled app, you have options to "Disable" and to "Force stop" the app.

What you can't is to remove the app and reclaim the storage it's taking.

At least so it looks on an un-rooted Sony phone running Android 7.0 that I have before me.

Many preinstalled apps that aren't essential are just a stub, a few kb that points to the app store to be downloaded on first boot.

When these are "disabled" all that remains on the device is a pointer to the app store in a disabled state. It's a few KB of data, and in my opinion a fantastic trade-off to actually allowing deletion then not being able to "factory reset" since that data is no longer on the device.

This is definitely not the case on any Android I've recently worked with, disabling Facebook, Google Play Games, Google Newsstand, etc all just delete the user data and supposedly disable the app.

I hate that this shovelware is on my phone in any form, and it makes me regret buying a non-ROMmable phone in the first place.

It's during that "delete the user data" that it removes any updates to the app leaving behind only the part installed on the system partition (which is read only).

But I should have been more clear. not all preinstalled apps are like this, just a lot of the less important ones (at least on google-branded phones, I have no idea what samsung or lg are doing to facebook). I believe it does require the developer of the app to actually implement it though.

But either way there is literally no benefit to removing those apps from the system partition. You won't get the space back (different partition), and if they allow users to delete these things they can very easily get their phone into a state that you can't recover from (factory reset won't work because there's nothing to reset to).

I'm 100% with you that non-essential apps should be uninstallable as much as possible, and preferably I'd like them to not be installed at all, but that's an entirely different issue than what Google was just fined for.

At the end of the day, i MUCH prefer Android's handling of removing/disabling factory installed apps over something like MacOS where if you "factory reset" the device, you can't use it again until you connect to a network and re-download the entire image.

Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition in the first place. A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.

Few Android users will ever experience a Google branded phone, mainly due to price and availability. I personally will never buy one after my friend's Pixel 2 XL started smoking, though that is her third failed Google phone. I joked that she should put it on the stack next to her Nexus 5X (defective solder joints) and OG Pixel (died of another hardware defect), but she shipped it back and is on week 3 of waiting to get the sucker back.

Comparatively, I've only ever seen one LG phone smoke that way, and an RMA request later I had an overnight shipping label and a new phone 2 days later. Wireless charging still worked in the meantime :P

> A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.

I don't mind a button that does that, but when the name is "factory reset", it's literally supposed to reset the phone to what it was like coming out of the factory, which includes whatever they bundled with it.

"Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition in the first place."

I completely agree, but that's not what this fine is about, and even the definition of what is "shovelware" is different for each person (I'd be annoyed if a browser wasn't installed by default).

Ironically what this fine is about will make it HARDER for Google to prevent shovelware (that's not theirs) from being included on the phone, because they can't threaten to take away access to the play store any more. So now Samsung is free to load up the bullshit onto the system partition and Google can't do much to stop them (or at least the bargaining chip that they were using is no longer an option).

For the record, I'm not against this EU decision, but I do have my issues with it.

It does give Samsung the ability to not include Google Play Movies and so forth in the system partition, which I'd be happy to see absent. Perhaps without Chrome shipping with every Android phone, there will be more users of alternative browsers on Android. This would be a welcome departure from the current state of affairs.

Yes, this decision does make it harder for google to strong arm Samsung into including Play Movies. But Samsung has shown many times that they have no issues including bloatware on their devices for some kind of pay.

It stands to reason that all Google would have to do is pay them, and the same result will still happen (unless this decision means that Google literally can't do that since they are in a dominant position, i'm not a lawyer so I don't know).

Overall I think we want the same stuff. More competition, less preinstalled shit, and a healthier ecosystem. However we disagree on how to get there. I personally think Android is heading the right direction. It's always been pretty simple to replace everything but the settings view with your own alternatives after install (hell, even the system web view can be swapped out, and IIRC Mozilla has been working on getting Firefox in a position so it can be the default web view on android if you want), and I agree that Google could be forced to do more in this space (a "select your browser from these 5 choices" is a good compromise, but I'd be pissed if I had to do that for my phone, messages, browser, email client, homescreen, etc... on every device i'd be annoyed. Not to mention that many people expect a Google phone to work well, and will go to Google when it doesn't. If my phone app stops working and I didn't choose the Google phone app, they now need to field calls from users who don't know Google can't do anything to fix it).

>A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.

Disagree. It's nice for the technically-inclined but terrible for everyone else.

It's scummy that carriers get paid to shovel this crap on, but I'd think many consumers expect some of these apps and suffer without them. They just want their phones "to work."

The non-technically inclined can easily download Facebook and the like, its nothing they're unfamiliar with. The big difference is whether or not a horribly out of date version of that app is permanently embedded in the phone's storage.

Without the play store? Which was wiped to make a clean android installation? :)

Maybe they could figure it out with some help but I'm certain that's frustrating for many consumers regardless.

Two different arguments here honestly. Apps should never be permanently embedded.

Oddly enough, all of this locking down by google has me checking if a phone can be rooted and bootloader unlocked before I buy...then I have to make sure the newer phones arent shipped updated as then I can no longer root. If I can't root then I can't remove bloatware crap. If I can't have adblock and lineageOS I'm simply not interested. No note 8 for me, probably not 9 either, which is a shame, as I would love to give them my money. Oh and the best part of ROMs? You can make them as Google free as you want, I quite literally only use their play store. So Google claiming necessary integration is BS pure and simple.

"Many preinstalled apps that aren't essential are just a stub"

I've never seen this. Just about every preinstalled app on the phones I've had are the actual app.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy S9 a few days back. The preinstalled Facebook app (which I immediately disabled) has a listed version of 'stub (23.1.1)', and it's only 127 kB large.

Don't you just need to long press the app icon and choose disable/delete?

For the ones that allow you to, yeah. But how would you e.g. easily disable/delete Google Play Services (say, if you didn't want Google on your phone)? The disable option is disabled.

Also, even when I try disabling some of these built-in Google apps that I supposedly can disable, I get a prompt warning me that "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave"... you can't keep a straight face telling a user "oh but you can easily disable this!" when you yourself are telling them the consequence is that it might break other things on their phone. (!)

They just mean apps that use Google play services will be broken. I don't think that's unreasonable. it seems you want it both ways, you want the ability to remove or disable Google play services, without losing access to them.

A lot of built in apps do not offer services to other apps, but they still display the same message. Google Play Services is the exceptional case.

Some of them simply reactivate/redownload themselves every time you do this.

You basically have to root the phone to remove a lot of the Google/vendor bloatware.

yes, but you cannot delete the google apps such as chrome or gmail (the option is not "enabled")

You can disable both. (I have Chrome disabled, because I like Firefox more).

Thankfully those are most often bundled as stubs that take barely any space. roll back the updates and then disable. Did that to Chrome for the longest time as i was using Firefox on my Android device (before Mozilla went nuts. Now i am flipflopping between Opera and Brave, while waiting for Vivaldi to get a mobile version).

Keep in mind that (a) if the fact that you have to roll back updates is not obvious to people here, I'm not sure how a normal user is supposed to find it "easy", and (b) if you have to roll it back too, you'd lose your data in that app, so it's neither as consequence-free as disabling, nor as thorough as deleting (freeing all the space etc.).

Simply hitting "disable" warns you that it will uninstall updates & delete user data.

It's literally a single button press to get back 100% of the space possible, and it's the button called "disable" right in front at the top of the app's info section.

It's infuriatingly confusing and it's not clear that you will get back 100% of the space. If they are sincere about this, why cannot you simply fucking uninstall the damn application ? No stub, no nothing. Just a normal app like the others, that you can install or not.

Because it's on the system partition which is fixed size and read-only. That's how factory reset works, by nuking the data partition.

They probably should just lie and rename the button to uninstall. That's basically what it is.

Yes, you can. Both gmail & chrome have working disable buttons. At least they do on a Pixel 2.

Disable is not delete.

Yes, it is. It no longer exists on the data partition nor can it run any code or be loaded. It has no size impact to you.

The only difference is a factory reset will restore it.

"Yes, it is"

No, it isn't. That's why they call it "disable" and not "delete".

Ok so they just need to rename the button and you're happy. Got it.

Some apps can't be disabled. The t-mobile application for instance.

Not just that you can't truly uninstall them without rooting the phone, but on my last android phone you couldn't even move Google's apps to the SD card to at least save some space.

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