Remember when Apple put a U2 song on everyone’s iPhone and people went nuts about it? How dare they do that! That was just a song.
Now companies just install whatever apps they want. And people just accept it.
Now companies just install whatever apps they want. And people just accept it.
That’s because the provider subsidizes the phone and people rather have that than to pay >1000 dollars at retail for an unbranded phone.
This has been a thing since before smartphones and the U2 stunt though. The PC manufacturers started doing it back in the early 2000s.
Didn’t Windows put a Weezer video on there or am I remembering something wrong?
There were some videos on some of the installation CDs…that’s all I remember. I don’t think they were automatically installed on your hard drive, but I could be wrong.
Yeah the video for Buddy Holly was on the Windows 95 install disc.
I seem to recall one from a woman, too… Ah, yes, I just looked it up - Edie Brickell’s Good Times.
Yeah Android manufacturers been doing this since its inception. I remember having to remove the Blockbuster app from my Droid X lol
One of the many reasons I will only ever buy Pixel phones. No bloatware.
Thinking about making the jump to grapheneos, the only thing holding me back is my addiction to Android Auto
GrapheneOS is pretty damn great. But yes… Android Auto is something I do miss :(
This is the main reason I’ve stuck with Nexus/Pixel. I’ve tried Samsung but everything on it is unwanted bloat. Amazing hardware screwed by bloat and duplicated apps. Shame.
I’m on a Pixel 4a right now running CalyxOS. I relly want to get a FairPhone next tho. Repairability is awesome
I agree. This is my work phone so I had no choice. My personal phone is the Pixel 5a.
Just my 2 cents I am on an unlocked S20 and don’t have these apps getting installed
If one of my relatives showed me this screen appearing on their phone I’d assume they have malware
As mentioned above, these probably are malware depending on your standards. It just came from Samsung or their carrier
This is definetely malware. OP has probably been doing funky stuff with his phone.
No they haven’t. This is stuff is commonly installed with updates from the carrier.
Since when did carriers have permission to do this stuff? I don’t remember stuff like this happening in 2014…
Ah yeha, sorry, didn’t read the Mobile Services Manager. But this is a common malware attack though.
You scared the crap outta me man. For a second I thought connect for lemmy sold out! Haha
Samsung is pretty much notorious for this, especially in developing countries where they bundle in every third-party service, PayLater app, shitty mobile game, etc alongside a new device. The only reason they are seen as preferable is that other companies are doing worse (see: Xiaomi).
I don’t know. Samsung seems like a very good company.
And I’m not saying that as they have an army and access to my location.
Blink twice if you’re in danger
Always seems like the Pixel phones are better tho
Correction: a good hardware company. That is of course if we disregard them turning some phones into bombs. But they also make screens, RAM and so on. I just always hated all their software. It’s utter garbage.
The OneUI is actually rather nice.
At least Xiaomi is telling their customers upfront that the reason they can sell their mid and low end android phones on the cheap ( by famously announcing to cap their hardware profit margin at 5% ) is due to advertising. IIRC their high end models do not have ads. Other manufacturers mocked xiaomi for this move, just like they mocked apple for removing headphone jack, then quietly follow the move anyway without telling their customers, which I think is an even bigger dick move.
I just got a Galaxy S23 about 2 weeks ago. It came with Facebook and Swiftkey as well as a bunch of Microsoft Apps. But no Tiktok, Games or other crap. Even after updating the OS nothing like that had been installed.
My guess is that a lot of people do not read anything and just rush through the initial setup process, thereby confirming things like wanting recommended apps to be installed.
Also there are some mentions of rooting here. I suggest to first give adb a try. It lets you uninstall any app without rooting (including Facebook and Swiftkey in my case).
+1 for ADB. Online tutorials are dead simple to follow. De-facebooking my phone and killing Bixby are the two things that made me decide not to trade this in for an old Razer Phone instead.
Yeah, I had a similar experience. I got my phone directly from Samsung, so it’s also likely it might have just been the Carrier that did this.
so it’s also likely it might have just been the Carrier that did this.
The answer is literally in the second line of the screenshot: “Mobile Services Manager”, so yes, provider branding.
Did you own a Galaxy before? For how long? In my experience Samsung does this through updates over time. Your S23 is good for up to about 6 years or until around 2028-2029; you will have this stuff pushed to your phone by end of 2024.
The problem with all the phone reviewers is they put zero thought/effort into the patterns of brands in how they support past models past mentioning how long you get security patches for. Reviewers just do not talk about this on past models in relation to new models.
I did not own one before, this is my first ever Samsung phone. So I can’t tell what they might or might not do in 6 years. Owning a phone for that long would be a first for me though. So far, all the Android phones I owned would stop receiving updates long before that.
Or you could just not buy a $2k phone loaded down with shitty bloatware.
Sent from my $700 Google Pixel 7 Pro
- I bought the Google Pixel 7a before this one. Software design was terrible and loaded with unnecessary “features”. Returned it.
- I agree it’s silly to spend that much on a phone. But the S23 was just under 800€ and I got a free pair of Galaxy Buds 2 Pro from a promotion.
Did you buy the Pixel 7a second hand or something, or through a carrier? The whole point of the Pixel phones is they’re stock Android with zero unnecessary apps pre installed. Your shitty Samsung also has Android, but Samsung puts their own slow, bloated as hell interface over it. Not to mention all of the bloatware pre installed. Stop lying lmao.
It seems that you get so enraged by someone daring to like a different product than you that you lose your reading comprehension. I said the software design was terrible (i.e. how the menus were styled). I never said anything about bloatware. Also we already established that you have no idea what those phones actually cost and just throw around some made up numbers. Who’s the liar now?
pixel 7 pro launched at 900$. s23 ultra launched at 1,200$. not an insane difference there for the amoled screen, better cameras, and s-pen. let people buy what they want 😭😭
Yeah, the Samsung phones are such a great value. They only come with about 20 apps you can’t uninstall unless you do some convoluted bullshit, the UI they draw over Android is bloated and slow as hell, and Bixbie is awful. Oh cool, there’s a 200mp camera. Something that only pro photographers care about lol. My Pixel 7 Pro takes phenomenal pictures, too, and isn’t a nightmare to deal with. So much value!
Oh cool, there’s a 200mp camera. Something that only pro photographers care about lol.
Oh this is a fun one! Trained, professional photographers generally don’t care either, since more megapixels aren’t guaranteed to make better photos.
Consider two sensors that take up the same physical space and capture light with the same efficiency/ability, but are 10 vs 40 megapixels. (Note: Realistically, a higher density would mean design trade-offs and more generous manufacturing tolerances.)
From a physics perspective, the higher megapixel sensor will collect the same amount of light spread over a more dense area. This means that the resolution of the captured light will be higher, but each single pixel will get less overall light.
So imagine we have 40 photons of light:
More Pixels Less Pixels ----------- ----------- 1 2 1 5 2 6 2 3 11 11 1 9 0 1 15 3 4 1 1 1When you zoom in to the individual pixels, the higher-resolution sensor will appear more noisy. This can be mitigated by pixel binning, which groups (or “bins”) those physical pixels into larger, virtual ones—essentially mimicking the lower-resolution sensor. Software can get crafty and try to use some more tricks to de-noise it without ruining the sharpness, though. Or if you could sit completely still for a few seconds, you could significantly lower the ISO and get a better average for each pixel.
Strictly from a physics perspective (and assuming the sensors are the same overall quality), higher megapixel sensors are better simply because you can capture more detail and end up with similar quality when you scale the picture down to whatever you’re comparing it against. More detail never hurts.
… Except when it does. Unless you save your photos as RAW (which take a massice amount of space), they’re going to be compressed into a lossy image format like JPEG. And the lovely thing about JPEG, is that it takes advantage of human vision to strip away visual information that we generally wouldn’t perceive, like slight color changes and high frequency details (like noise!)
And you can probably see where this is going: the way that the photo is encoded and stored destroys data that would have otherwise ensured you could eventually create a comparable (or better) photo. Luckily, though, the image is pre-processed by the camera software before encoding it as a JPEG, applying some of those quality-improving tricks before the data is lost. That leaves you at the mercy of the manufacturer’s software, however.
In summary: more megapixels is better in theory. In practice, bad software and image compression negate the advantages that a higher resolution provides, and higher-density sensors likely mean lower-quality data. Also, don’t expect more megapixels to mean better zoom. You would need an actual lense for that.
Hate my 7 pro. Double tap light sometimes works, sometimes… The phone is over heating every fuckin time I open the cameras app which is rare as fuck. My fingerprint sensor works half the time unless I disable the extra I actually want that come with the phone. There’s a line the down the middle of my screen that appears randomly and it’s annoying which I think is part of my fingerprint issue. I miss my nexus Shamu that was a great Google phone.
Damn, I’m sorry you’ve had that experience with it. It sounds like you got a lemon. I’ve had every other Pixel phone since the first one, and never had any of those issues.
Aww yeah Pixel gang 😎
Or you could just not buy a phone loaded down with shitty bloatware.
Sent from my Google Pixel 7 Pro
I’ve had a Galaxy Note 10+ for 3 years and I’ve now had an S23 Ultra since around February. Not once have I had random apps installed.
I’m with Rogers Wireless in Canada.
you can disable the app manager thing and it should stop these.
or just buy an S series phone, they don’t come with any non-samsung bloatware. A series are partially bloatware-funded.edit: this looks like carrier bloat to me
Sheesh, even my S-series phone comes with a few extra things that I cannot easily get rid of or uninstall…
ah that must be it.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/18/samsung_bluray_mass_dieoff_explained/ shoutouts to the time Samsung bricked my blu ray player
Never again Samsung. Never again.
Never again Samsung. Never again.
Provider branding, not Samsung.
There are basically no ads if you buy Samsung S series without a carrier.
Soooooo you don’t want to play solitaire Grand harvest?
I have had the recent S series Samsung phones and no bloatware was uninstalled via updates like this, that’s still disappointing to see
I hate that. One of the reasons I dislike Samsung phones. Last phone from them was a Note 8 and unless they go back to a pure Android experience, I won’t get another. We know that isn’t happening any time soon.
Honestly I’m super over all our current choices. Im on an iPhone and while I like their privacy stuff slightly better than android, there are lots of things I don’t like.
I also hate how much metadata the big G snorts up. Even just the location data they retain is out of this world.
There just aren’t any options if you want something that doesn’t keep you boxed into a closed ecosystem or track every love you make.
It’s really frustrating because Samsung is basically the leader in Android phones right now.
I hope we get a bunch of new good options this year because I really need to upgrade and posts like this remind me why I don’t by Samsung.
What about the fairphones? I was reading up on them and might get one. I like that they come with an android fork and open-source apps so you don’t have to deal with Google. Plus being fully repairable and sustainably-made. Does anyone have any experience with them?
The problem is getting one if you’re in North America…
Where are they originally? Would it be easier to get one in Europe?
I have a note 9 and i think its time to replace this piece of shit. It lasted like 2 years without problems and then “magically” is started to fail
They have officially come to the US recently: https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4/
But they’re in America now? https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4/
Good to know, thanks. Hopefully they’ll come to Canada soon too.
wtf do you go with for a quality hardware android reasonably priced? LG got out of the phone game which sucks ass. Pixel can be great but they are all flagship prices. Samsung, while having horrible shit like this, is quality hardware and has lots of models under $200.
You can get a Google pixel and sideload an operating system such as Grapheneos, and you won’t have to deal with any of Google’s bs spying. Highly recommend looking into it.
Yeah. That’s what I’ve been looking into. I used to root and do roms and stuff. Back in the day I was pretty involved in the XDA community.
At that point why not just using Samsung phone and sideload the OS? Seems weird to do that on Pixel which has inferior hardware and good software (like its camera apps), and then remove the software
Simple reason being that there’s no notoriously good OS for Samsung phones.
Graphene is highly focused on not being annoying while keeping privacy intact. You can, for example, have Google Play Services, within a sandbox. Everything can be denied network access, or any access really, on a per app basis.
It also relies on Google’s security chip to keep the chain of trust intact. The boot sequence and your private keys are kept intact that way. Not everyone documents and opens their hardware as well as Google. Samsung is notoriously terrible and full of it when it comes to allowing you to do your own thing.
I recently just bought a pixel 6 and have been interested in Graphene OS, but would I lose features like live translate and the hold for me feature?
live translate
What is that? Google translate listening and translating live? Google lens translating images? Both work.
hold for me feature
No clue about what that is.
In general most things work just the same, and things that do not tend to be listed in the Graphene docs.
I wanted to do that but need to use Google apps for work (specifically google chat won’t work).
You can run Google Play services on GrapheneOS it’s called Sanboxed Google Play. It allows you to run Play services as a normal app without any special privileges so you can install it without sacrificing all of your phones data to google. Should allow you to use pretty much all Google apps.
This isn’t enough for work apps that require Android Device Policy unfortunately. When I researched it in November I found that it would require too many permissions so GrapheneOS isn’t planning on supporting it.
I recently made the switch and it’s great. Definitely takes a bit of understanding and research to know what you’re getting into, though.
Apple’s biggest success is convincing people they care about your privacy.
A SIM card doesn’t have that kind of power over your phone. I’ve gone through 4-5 MVNOs on Pixel phones and not once has a SIM card done anything except provide cellular service.
They do have a lot of power over the device. They run the Oracle Java card standard and are a complete computer that can even run a webserver. They can interact with host events like call starting and call ending. Not sure if they can install user apps. But I have had a carrier push a voicemail shortcut into my app draw that would auto call the voicemail number when pressed. I couldn’t remove it unless I removed the Sim.
Wonder if that would install on a phone running graphene
That’s insane, I didn’t realize that tiny thing is a computer, let alone one running a tiny JcVM! Thank you for the educative link!
I worked in support for a phone manufacturer for a while. I have once seen an app get pushed by the SIM. I also however have seen plenty of really sketchy apps preinstalled or installed with updates by the carrier on carrier branded phones.
Some years ago I forget if it was Ting or Cricket would preinstall the Wish app and it received an update that added ads that would pop up at random while using the device including on the home screen (and fairly frequently at that) so for a while we’d get calls about that and pretty quickly get the Wish app off of those folks phones
Then one of the TracFone brands preinstalles a bunch of advertising directly on the home screen. It was something called app box or something like that and it would literally show an app icon on your home screen so you’d click it and maybe choose to install it
