Samsung needs to stop installing apps without our permission - XDA Developers
You should own your smartphone after spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for it. Samsung needs to stop installing apps without permission.
If you've ever owned a Samsung smartphone, you'll know that the company installs a ton of bloatware beyond what is actually needed to use it. This is partly because One UI is an operating system built upon another operating system, so you'll have duplicate applications. There's the Google Play Store and the Samsung Galaxy Store, Google Messages and Samsung Messages, and so on. There are other extraneous apps installed when you start up a Samsung device for the first time, like Samsung Messages and Samsung Health. If the bloatware and unwanted installations stopped there, it would be a slight annoyance we could look past.
But unfortunately, that isn't the case. Daily driving a Samsung phone means you'll be subjected to whatever apps the company would like to install and without your permission. There are some steps you can take to combat this — disabling the Galaxy Store and removing app permissions is a good start — but the bloatware will keep popping up. I've spent the past two years with a Galaxy Z Flip 3 and a Galaxy Z Fold 4, and the issue hasn't gotten better. In fact, it may have gotten worse.
Do you own your phone, or does Samsung?
Samsung's bloatware problem can be traced back to a simple question: Who owns your phone? It's a question that can be applied to the entire technology, appliance, and automotive industry, not just your phone. It's the same issue that affects right-to-repair advocates and the same questions we ask when car companies charge subscription services for heated seats. In this case, the question is whether you have full autonomy over your smartphone.
If you pay upwards of a thousand dollars for a smartphone, you should at least be able to choose what apps are installed on it.
Samsung will install bloatware on your device initially, which makes sense, but when you remove or disable those apps, you might expect that to be the end of it. However, Samsung will continually keep installing more apps without a user's knowledge or permission as long as the phone receives updates. These updates can then become an annoyance; you won't know what bloatware or unwanted games will be found on your phone when the update finishes.
If you pay upwards of a thousand dollars for a smartphone, you should at least be able to choose what apps are installed on it. For Samsung, the customer is a way to make more revenue for advertising or promotions. That would be an acceptable revenue model for a free app or service that uses advertisements in place of customer-facing fees, but it's not acceptable when you already pay a lump sum for a smartphone.
Bloatware makes your phone run slower and fills up your storage
When old smartphones start to get slower, the problem isn't limited to just old hardware. It's also due to the multitude of applications and data files that have been installed over the years, which can fill up storage space and can slow down your smartphone. The more apps that are installed, the more background processes are taking place on your device. That's why a complete restore and fresh operating system install is recommended for users who find their smartphone is getting slow.
It's understandable that after a few years, you've downloaded enough apps and added enough data files to slow down the system. But what isn't understandable is that Samsung's pre-installed bloatware could be bogging down your smartphone from the start. Since most Samsung phones don't have expandable storage, what you buy is what you get. Phones with 128GB or even 256GB of storage can be filled fairly quickly with photos and videos, apps, and media. As such, the apps that Samsung routinely installs without your consent could be taking up your limited storage space or limiting performance.
The pre-installed apps and games aren't exactly high quality
If the pre-installed apps and games found on Samsung devices were high quality — perhaps even paid games offered for free — they might actually be a perk. But they're not often of high quality. Instead, they're cheap games that you might see in an advertisement on Instagram or TikTok. When I updated my Galaxy Z Fold 4 to One UI 5.1, I found the Caesers Slots app installed on my phone afterward.
Surprisingly, the Caesers Slots app isn't actually owned or operated by Caesers Holdings, which is the company that runs casinos and sports books of the same name. Instead, it's a gambling simulation game that appears to license the Caesers name. That comes with its own set of problems. Samsung makes some of the best cheap phones on the market today, and they're great options for kids as a result. But if there's a chance you could come home to your child playing simulated slot machines because Samsung installed a game without your consent, would you even consider Samsung for a smartphone? For me, the answer is probably not.
Is the issue really that big of a deal?
For some, having to delete a few apps or games from your smartphone every month isn't that much of an annoyance. It also might not be that much of a factor in your purchase decision when you're looking for a new phone. However, Samsung's practice of installing apps and games onto smartphones without a user's decision can severely impact the user experience found on the company's phones. Considering One UI is already a heavy Android skin, the pre-installed apps on Samsung devices are another annoyance that comes with owning the company's phones.
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