If you’re a seasoned smartphone user then chances are you’ve come up against bloatware. In the age of the smartphone, bloatware probably ranks second on my list of things that can kill a phone (the first being terrible battery life). But if you’re a casual tech user you may never have heard of the term bloatware so what exactly is it? Bloatware is the collective name for software that suck every bit of available memory and disk space to do their task, with the general consensus being that any developer who produces bloatware gets a one stop ticket downstairs. Bloatware is often one of the factors that results in your brand new smartphone taking on the performance of an anesthetized turtle after a year of use.
The problem however, with most smartphones and quite a few off the shelf laptops and PCs, is that bloatware is all too common, despite it being atrocious. Surprisingly the problem starts not in the incubators of app developers or the floors of hackathons, but in the very companies that design smartphones. Take my Nexus for example, if I factory reset it this very moment, all of my personal data and the majority of my applications will be deleted, breathing life into my smartphone. Essentially I would be defibrillating my phone, but much like the medical procedure, this doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem; some apps would still remain. In the case of my Nexus, it’s the so called “stock” or “core” apps, which in this case would be anything by Google. Never have I, since the day I got this phone, used Google Earth. Nor have I used Google Slides. Just these two apps together take nearly 200 MB of space and while that may not seem a lot, for a phone without an external memory card it in fact is. And while these apps do not necessarily devour as much RAM and space as most constitutional bloatware apps do, the fact that you can’t uninstall them is, in my opinion, villainous.
And if you still think that being unable to uninstall apps isn’t that big a deal, you’re in for a rude awakening. It’s big enough deal that Google is facing lawsuits in Russia after the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service found that Android unfairly favours Google services. The authority went on to further accuse Google of abusing its dominant position in the smartphone and tablet markets. It would rather that phones simply shipped with the Google Play Store, leaving users free to choose the rest of their apps (which would be heaven-sent for most android users). The body will be issuing detailed instructions to Google about how to proceed within the next 10 days. Russia isn’t the only such country who takes issue with Google’s pre installation of uninstallable apps, the tech company is also under investigation by the European Commission regarding its Android OS and pre-installed services.
Luckily some companies do see the annoyances bloatware depicts to its users; Apple’s CEO Tim Cook stated that his company is looking for ways in which iPhone and iPad users can get rid of unwanted “core” apps. If you’re confused as to why the removal of apps needs more thought, Tim Cook went on to say: “This is a more complex issue than it first appears. There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone. If they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate; we’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at.”
Unfortunately though there is no timestamp as to when such core apps would be removable, either on the iOS platform or the stock Android operating system. One of the biggest victims of bloatware was Samsung and they’ve made no secret that they’ve taken dramatic actions to scale it down such as being able to delete nearly all non essential apps. For the rest of us however, the best we can do is install CCleaner with the hope it can do a better job than us at keeping our smartphones bloat free.
What do you think about the problems associated with bloatware? Do you think smartphone developers should give us more control over the apps we have on our phones? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
