8 ms·

“If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn’t include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem,” I

“If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn’t include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem,” Its as though Pichai thinks people actually want all of Google's shovelware on their devices. Why does Google try and sneakily update and re-enable their low quality Newsstand, Games and other apps that I literally do not want on my phone? Unbundling is the right move, even the Play Store should not be in the ROM itself, as when it gets updated you have no way to free the space that is used by the older version of the Play APK. That is what infuriates me about bundled shovelware like <vendor specific apps>, Facebook, <carrier apps>, when those get updated or disabled, you still don't get to delete the original APK file. Your never getting that room on your storage back!

kajecounterhack 8y ago
Is losing 10, even 100mb something to get "infuriated" about when phones have 32-128gb now, and 100mb is like 1 video you took? It's not like this is Windows system tray software where your precious ram is being eaten up. It's disk space dude. (Also being able to factory reset the phone is worth losing 100mb imo.)
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  I want my storage, and advertising for memory on device these days is fraudulent. How many of the supposed 32GB of flash is actually available once you boot your phone up? Generally 7GB to 11GB is eaten by Android and shovelware right off the bat, I'd call it fraud if something is sold to me with the expectation of 34% more storage space than what I actually end up with.
  - kajecounterhack 8y ago
    It's not fraudulent; your expectations are out of line. If you flash some other OS onto your device, you'll have (32gb - whatever the size of your OS is). So to market the device as having 32gb, then having the OS take up some space, is completely accurate. The _specs_ do not indicate how much actual free space you have. This is the nature of electronic devices that have memory but require software to work.
    - StudentStuff 8y ago
      Flashing a different OS onto most Android devices isn't possible, especially if its not a newer flagship phone. There is no foreseeable way to recover even part of this space on most Androids, which is especially troublesome considering they ship with under 32GB of storage usually.
      - kajecounterhack 8y ago
        Regardless the point was that the spec is factually correct so there's no bait and switch here. If you're lamenting the need to understand that OS'es take up space on the phone you purchased, I don't know what to tell you. Nobody gives the "with OS" memory figure.
- MrLeap 8y ago
  For me it's not about the space, but this kind of thing infuriates me too. I'm struggling to articulate a concise way to describe why practices like this upsets me so much. When I fall victim to things like this, I feel like companies are forcing my head into a pile of shit. With android, The only time it ever happened to me was when I got an HTC evo. I spent half a months rent on that thing and Sprint decided to bundle it with a ton of applications I absolutely did not want. Finding out I couldn't uninstall their ringtone store, whatever app blockbuster paid to have shit into my phone and all the other nonsense admittedly raised my blood pressure. I did a lot of googling and was made even angrier to learn that the only way around it was to re-flash the firmware. At the time, the outcomes I was reading about seemed pretty mixed so this seemed awfully risky to do to my new phone. Since then, I only buy unlocked phones so I can get at that /system folder if I need to. Unfortunately, anything that has a socket back to the mothership eventually seems to decay into shit. My ps4 has been moving the streaming apps I use further and further down the UI so I have to go back to scroll past whatever company de jure they've sold me out to this week. Their file system has tons of options to customize sorting / positioning / visibility of everything except their streaming section, because "fuck you, you're still revenue" despite having spent 400$ on the box. I hate how often I get reminded that Stallman was right. What if every time you went to your closet to find a shirt, the company that built your house had hung a new multi million dollar company's representative on one of your hangers that screams "HEY GIVE ME MONEY, I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT WILL FINALLY MAKE YOU HAPPY" as bright lights flash in your face and sirens spin. Every time one of your neighbors gives them a dollar you can hear the celebratory gong from your breakfast table. It's corporate panhandling, and once you make the mistake of buying a device their dicks are still inside you're now forced to suck it down. Maybe it shouldn't make me so angry, but it does.
  - davegauer 8y ago
    Absolutely right on the emotional mark! I have intentionally entered into plenty of relationships with companies to have cheap(er) product subsidized by advertising. It's a choice and I know what I'm getting. But I feel like we're getting to the point where no amount of money is enough to opt out of ads in certain types of products: * Physical copies of movies * Non-libre operating systems [1] * Gaming consoles * Phones * Most websites * Most print media (excepting books) * All television In many of these cases, I've chosen to not participate at all, rather than enter into such an agreement. But that's kind of sad. [1] I'm really just generalizing about consumer Windows here. Sweet monkey lord, when I open the "Start" menu on a nearby Windows 10 laptop, it's visually like walking into a Las Vegas casino! I assume the enterprise Windows situation is not like that? Also, I don't know if it's better or worse on Macs?
- gajjanag 8y ago
  In a sense, yes. I currently have a Moto G 1st generation that I acquired approximately 4 years back. I intended to keep it for at least a year or 2 more, but through the steady accumulation of such 100 mb losses, I have ~ 500 mb storage left on an 8 gb phone. Now, with a reasonable OS that should be enough. However, Android insists that it does not have enough storage for app updates, and keeps bugging me with a notification for this. I fail to understand how this is possible given that the app size itself is less than a 100 mb in many cases. Almost every week I am forced to clear the cache in order to perform updates. I believe this has something to do with the swap file - but am not sure. As a consumer, I feel artificially pushed onto a useless upgrade train. The only reason I am merely annoyed and not infuriated is because I have finally found a legitimate reason (for my needs) to upgrade - a better camera.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - thechriswalker 8y ago
    I have a Moto G 1st generation and put LineageOS [0] on it. Far better experience and much more free space. Unfortunately won't help with making the camera better. [0] https://download.lineageos.org/falcon https://download.lineageos.org/falcon
- zaarn 8y ago
  High End Market Phones have 32 GB and upwards. If you go to the low budget market in other countries, finding phones with 2 and 4GB of internal memory is not rare, even common. The cameras are so potato that 100mb of video is a long recording time too. Lots of people can't afford or don't want to afford the high end phones that Samsung or HTC have.
vetinari 8y ago
In the same way, you won't get back the space taken by recovery partition on a random laptop. It's there for a reason - to get the device back to the same state as it left the factory. If you could remove random apks from there, that objective would be impossible. So on Android devices, the /system partition is read-only intentionally. The space taken by it at least has a use during both runtime and recovery; traditionally the recovery is completely wasted space. What I do mind thought, is the Android vendor's ability to prevent user disabling their apps, and abusing it. There's no reason why I should keep Samsung's (for example) showelware enabled.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition, plain and simple. Its a bad industry practice, even on Laptops (which do let you delete the recovery partition FYI).
  - vetinari 8y ago
    On (unlocked) mobiles, you can re-partition the device and write /system image without the apps you don't want too. Few users will bother, just like few users will bother with deleting the recovery partitions on laptops.
    - MrLeap 8y ago
      By request, I've done this for friends and family a few times. Few users bother because it's made arbitrarily difficult so as to seem dangerous to many non IT professionals. Sony has been getting more and more aggressive shoveling garbage down my throat via the playstation 4 funnel. I can't imagine ever giving them another dime as a result. Hopefully they'll keep going until they cross most people's line so the door can swing the other way.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        With the ARM platform, resizing the partitions comes with significant risk if something goes wrong. In the PC-land, the equivalent would be the potential of losing your BIOS/UEFI. Many people would then think twice about repartitioning. PC repartitioning only looks dangerous, because ordinary users are not aware where they put their data, and changing partitions and resizing filesystems is a nice way to loose at least some of them. I don't own PS4, so I cannot comment on that. I do own Xperia phone thought, and I'm satisfied with it.

kajecounterhack 8y ago

Is losing 10, even 100mb something to get "infuriated" about when phones have 32-128gb now, and 100mb is like 1 video you took? It's not like this is Windows system tray software where your precious ram is being eaten up. It's disk space dude. (Also being able to factory reset the phone is worth losing 100mb imo.)

StudentStuff 8y ago
I want my storage, and advertising for memory on device these days is fraudulent. How many of the supposed 32GB of flash is actually available once you boot your phone up? Generally 7GB to 11GB is eaten by Android and shovelware right off the bat, I'd call it fraud if something is sold to me with the expectation of 34% more storage space than what I actually end up with.
- kajecounterhack 8y ago
  It's not fraudulent; your expectations are out of line. If you flash some other OS onto your device, you'll have (32gb - whatever the size of your OS is). So to market the device as having 32gb, then having the OS take up some space, is completely accurate. The _specs_ do not indicate how much actual free space you have. This is the nature of electronic devices that have memory but require software to work.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    Flashing a different OS onto most Android devices isn't possible, especially if its not a newer flagship phone. There is no foreseeable way to recover even part of this space on most Androids, which is especially troublesome considering they ship with under 32GB of storage usually.
    - kajecounterhack 8y ago
      Regardless the point was that the spec is factually correct so there's no bait and switch here. If you're lamenting the need to understand that OS'es take up space on the phone you purchased, I don't know what to tell you. Nobody gives the "with OS" memory figure.
MrLeap 8y ago
For me it's not about the space, but this kind of thing infuriates me too. I'm struggling to articulate a concise way to describe why practices like this upsets me so much. When I fall victim to things like this, I feel like companies are forcing my head into a pile of shit. With android, The only time it ever happened to me was when I got an HTC evo. I spent half a months rent on that thing and Sprint decided to bundle it with a ton of applications I absolutely did not want. Finding out I couldn't uninstall their ringtone store, whatever app blockbuster paid to have shit into my phone and all the other nonsense admittedly raised my blood pressure. I did a lot of googling and was made even angrier to learn that the only way around it was to re-flash the firmware. At the time, the outcomes I was reading about seemed pretty mixed so this seemed awfully risky to do to my new phone. Since then, I only buy unlocked phones so I can get at that /system folder if I need to. Unfortunately, anything that has a socket back to the mothership eventually seems to decay into shit. My ps4 has been moving the streaming apps I use further and further down the UI so I have to go back to scroll past whatever company de jure they've sold me out to this week. Their file system has tons of options to customize sorting / positioning / visibility of everything except their streaming section, because "fuck you, you're still revenue" despite having spent 400$ on the box. I hate how often I get reminded that Stallman was right. What if every time you went to your closet to find a shirt, the company that built your house had hung a new multi million dollar company's representative on one of your hangers that screams "HEY GIVE ME MONEY, I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT WILL FINALLY MAKE YOU HAPPY" as bright lights flash in your face and sirens spin. Every time one of your neighbors gives them a dollar you can hear the celebratory gong from your breakfast table. It's corporate panhandling, and once you make the mistake of buying a device their dicks are still inside you're now forced to suck it down. Maybe it shouldn't make me so angry, but it does.
- davegauer 8y ago
  Absolutely right on the emotional mark! I have intentionally entered into plenty of relationships with companies to have cheap(er) product subsidized by advertising. It's a choice and I know what I'm getting. But I feel like we're getting to the point where no amount of money is enough to opt out of ads in certain types of products: * Physical copies of movies * Non-libre operating systems [1] * Gaming consoles * Phones * Most websites * Most print media (excepting books) * All television In many of these cases, I've chosen to not participate at all, rather than enter into such an agreement. But that's kind of sad. [1] I'm really just generalizing about consumer Windows here. Sweet monkey lord, when I open the "Start" menu on a nearby Windows 10 laptop, it's visually like walking into a Las Vegas casino! I assume the enterprise Windows situation is not like that? Also, I don't know if it's better or worse on Macs?
gajjanag 8y ago
In a sense, yes. I currently have a Moto G 1st generation that I acquired approximately 4 years back. I intended to keep it for at least a year or 2 more, but through the steady accumulation of such 100 mb losses, I have ~ 500 mb storage left on an 8 gb phone. Now, with a reasonable OS that should be enough. However, Android insists that it does not have enough storage for app updates, and keeps bugging me with a notification for this. I fail to understand how this is possible given that the app size itself is less than a 100 mb in many cases. Almost every week I am forced to clear the cache in order to perform updates. I believe this has something to do with the swap file - but am not sure. As a consumer, I feel artificially pushed onto a useless upgrade train. The only reason I am merely annoyed and not infuriated is because I have finally found a legitimate reason (for my needs) to upgrade - a better camera.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- thechriswalker 8y ago
  I have a Moto G 1st generation and put LineageOS [0] on it. Far better experience and much more free space. Unfortunately won't help with making the camera better. [0] https://download.lineageos.org/falcon https://download.lineageos.org/falcon
zaarn 8y ago
High End Market Phones have 32 GB and upwards. If you go to the low budget market in other countries, finding phones with 2 and 4GB of internal memory is not rare, even common. The cameras are so potato that 100mb of video is a long recording time too. Lots of people can't afford or don't want to afford the high end phones that Samsung or HTC have.

vetinari 8y ago

In the same way, you won't get back the space taken by recovery partition on a random laptop. It's there for a reason - to get the device back to the same state as it left the factory. If you could remove random apks from there, that objective would be impossible. So on Android devices, the /system partition is read-only intentionally. The space taken by it at least has a use during both runtime and recovery; traditionally the recovery is completely wasted space. What I do mind thought, is the Android vendor's ability to prevent user disabling their apps, and abusing it. There's no reason why I should keep Samsung's (for example) showelware enabled.

StudentStuff 8y ago
Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition, plain and simple. Its a bad industry practice, even on Laptops (which do let you delete the recovery partition FYI).
- vetinari 8y ago
  On (unlocked) mobiles, you can re-partition the device and write /system image without the apps you don't want too. Few users will bother, just like few users will bother with deleting the recovery partitions on laptops.
  - MrLeap 8y ago
    By request, I've done this for friends and family a few times. Few users bother because it's made arbitrarily difficult so as to seem dangerous to many non IT professionals. Sony has been getting more and more aggressive shoveling garbage down my throat via the playstation 4 funnel. I can't imagine ever giving them another dime as a result. Hopefully they'll keep going until they cross most people's line so the door can swing the other way.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      With the ARM platform, resizing the partitions comes with significant risk if something goes wrong. In the PC-land, the equivalent would be the potential of losing your BIOS/UEFI. Many people would then think twice about repartitioning. PC repartitioning only looks dangerous, because ordinary users are not aware where they put their data, and changing partitions and resizing filesystems is a nice way to loose at least some of them. I don't own PS4, so I cannot comment on that. I do own Xperia phone thought, and I'm satisfied with it.