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Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy
- breppp 1y ago[flagged]
- xnx 1y agoGetting an Android phone from anyone but Google seems like a nightmare.
- duxup 1y agoI recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account. What a horrible experience you get with some providers and phones. It's to the point that I think there should be some sort of regulation that involves you getting a baseline experience on the OS rather than a bunch of malware out of the box.
- atonse 1y agoMy guess is, those auto installs is exactly how they keep the costs down, by subsidizing the cost with getting paid by companies to auto-install garbage. It's the same with Smart TVs, they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff the manufacturers do, like sell your watch data, or pre-install apps.
- esafak 1y agoThe problem is that you do not get the option to pay off the subsidy to get a clean install.
- atonse 1y agoI suppose the "paying off the subsidy" is to buy a more expensive phone. Or getting a Google Pixel. I've heard those are as much stock android as possible.
- xethos 1y agoI agree, and that's the exact point I would make. The problem though, is I want a small phone with a headphone jack (and a physical keyboard, but that's orthogonal to the point). Many OEMs sell their flagship as a shiny glass slab with only BT or USB-C for audio, and ship 3.5mm jacks and other "antiquated niceties" like a uSD card reader, on their lower-end models. It's difficult to square the circle of "I want these specific features, but on a phone that's not working against me (any more than modern phones already do)"
- HeinzStuckeIt 1y agoI must admit, I don’t get the wish for 3.5mm headphone jacks in 2025. Already six years ago, with a phone that actually still had a headphone jack, I bought myself for just a few euro a Bluetooth DAC (a FiiO) that had superior sound quality to any phone’s audio-out that I had ever used. With a Bluetooth DAC (or with any USB-C to 3.5mm converter that costs pennies) you can still use whatever wired headphones you want to use. Physical keyboards were nice back in an era when the web welcomed longform text, and I miss my Nokia N900. Nowadays, though, the web ecosystem that one typically uses from a phone is a cesspool, and for serious things I’ll just use my real computer.
- blep-arsh 1y agoI have a similar FiiO gadget and it makes less sense for me than a direct wired connection to the phone. It's a relatively bulky device that needs to be charged way too often, also it reduces voice call quality (like any other BT Classic device).
- ipaddr 1y agoBluetooth wastes batteries / alter soubd.
- elsjaako 1y agoI've heard this theory before, but is an individual data point really worth enough to make this argument?
- takipsizad 1y agoits not just your data point its everyones data point
- rubyn00bie 1y agoThis is true, it’s not an individual datapoint. When smartphones, like the iPhone, originally debuted carriers had a conniption fit because they couldn’t preload a ton of garbage apps to help subsidize the cost. Apple has been able to avoid this, but for your average smartphone this is absolutely how both the manufacturer and carrier are able to sell them so cheaply. Every experience may not be as bad as the one the OP had, but it’s surely well within reality. Both carriers and handset manufacturers are glad to sell anything and everything about someone to make a quick buck. They’ve literally been doing it for 25+ years.
- montjoy 1y agoYou need to think about the aggregate data. Whole trends can be seen in almost real-time. Here’s a made up example, and it’s probably not even the best one. - Show Teckno-Detectives shows a “Cameo” of Grapple’s newest mixed-reality glasses. The data shows that 3.9 million additional people watched the episode. Investment firms who pay for the data notice and buy extra Grapple shares to cash in on the expected sales bump.
- elsjaako 1y agoYes, but to make it worthwhile you need a lot of data and the price scales linearly. Let's say my phone gets $10 cheaper because of all this crap ware. If you have the aggregate of 1000 people that cost someone $10000. Is that really worth it? Is 100000 people worth $1000000? Is there some point at which the aggregate data becomes so valuable it overtakes the per-user cost? That's what I mean - the marginal value of one person needs to be quite big for this whole thing to make sense.
- kakacik 1y agoNah its the corporate greed and disregard for avoiding amoral behavior at the first place, since clearly its punished much less than rewards are (just look at all the slaps on the wrist of FAANGs and similar), then followed by race to the bottom with the price. Economies of scale do bring costs of everything much further than stealing user's data can, but good luck explaining some long term vision to C-suites who only care about short term bonuses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tyfon 1y agoI suspect the apparent reduction in price on these devices is a lot less than what they earn from the slimy stuff. But the premium devices (especially TVs) are starting to do this too now via software updates. I had to turn off a bunch of crap in the settings on my LG CX TVs some time ago. Now they are just off the internet and can only connect to my NAS.
- ghurtado 1y ago> they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff Not really, they've gotten so cheap because the individual components they are made of have become much cheaper due to economies of scale. The same thing happened with computer monitors, and those don't ship with the bloatware.
- brookst 1y agoCompare monitors to TVs of similar spec, in price and bloatware.
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoThis is not a valid cause. They spend insane amounts of money on advertising and also make insane amounts of revenue. Don’t think “them keeping the cost down” is relevant in this context.
- ravenstine 1y agoThat would make Samsung's business model not viable. :D
- jajuuka 1y agoSounds like the average carrier locked Samsung device experience in the US. Oh you didn't want Clash of Clans installed? We'll reinstall that for you next OS update. Running updates through carriers was a serious mistake.
- jacquesm 1y agoRunning remote updates in general was a serious mistake. Other manufacturers are no better and give you all kinds of crap for their income streams at the expense of your convenience whilst claiming the opposite. The last time I saw an update that just fixed security bugs and improved performance was... never.
- avn2109 1y agoI took this seriously and thought back to the most recent actually-useful-bugfixes-and-security-improvements release that I can remember. OSX Snow Leopard perhaps?
- Forgeties79 1y agoWasn’t that also Apple’s last paid OS?
- cryzinger 1y agoI was wondering why this thankfully hasn't been my experience until you said "carrier locked"... I always buy unlocked. Does that really make a difference?
- SoftTalker 1y agoYes, the carriers load up the phones with apps that you cannot remove (at least not without rooting the phone). You can usually disable them, but they are still there.
- cryzinger 1y ago
- summermusic 1y agoThis is why custom ROM support is the first question I ask when buying a new Android phone
- t0bia_s 1y agoRather refurbished, because those are longer on market thus development of custom ROM (like LineageOS) is more likely. And of course you save a lot of money.
- summermusic 1y agoTotally, by "new" I mean refurbished or used, but new to me :)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jeroenhd 1y agoCheap devices get subsidized by shitty adware. The cheaper the device, the more likely that it's full of terrible adware. Consumers often have a choice, at least between "filled to the brim with crap" and "a modicum of crap", by choosing between buying their phone from a store or from a carrier. Carriers have better deals but shovel their phones full of the worst apps you can imagine. Still, people will buy the crap-filled experience that makes you want to tear your hair out because they like the idea of scoring a better deal. Nothing like unadulterated greed combined with short-sighed consumer behaviour at scale to drive a market segment into an awful race to the bottom.
- oceansky 1y agoThe premium devices still have the bloatware.
- smileson2 1y agoYeah, even the iPhone bundles/bakes in google junk
- robocat 1y ago> subsidized What's a better word here? Adverts cost the consumer, however I'm sure the consumer doesn't get equal recompense. Theoretically a SmartTV with adverts costs less money ("subsidised" due to price competition), but is the consumer actually ($,time) better off? The costs are invisible and the consumer cannot actually measure the costs (the vendors do measure profitability but this is not legible). I reckon most people are terrible at judging the value of their own time (especially children and retirees).
- jay_kyburz 1y agoName and shame please. I'm shopping for a cheap first phone for my 13 year old. I'm looking at HMD or Motorola.
- kbelder 1y agoI kind of like Motorola in the cheap android phone space. I have a moto-g stylus in my pocket now, and it's big (which I like), has a heaphone jack, and has an sd-card port. I thought I'd like the stylus, but I rarely use it. It pre-installs some games, but you can uninstall them. The only thing it forces on you is a weather app which you can deactivate but not uninstall.
- rootusrootus 1y agoI remember back when the iPhone came out, this was perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of it, at least to me. We were so used to phones coming with crap on them and tightly coupled to the carrier. If the carrier didn't want something on the phone, it never got there. So Apple comes along and says "Hey, AT&T, we will make you the exclusive carrier for the iPhone iff you leave the entire experience under our control." There were lots of downsides to that deal, of course, but I appreciate that it broke the carriers' exclusive control over mobile phones.
- cyanydeez 1y ago"I was so happy to get locked into a different eco system" is all I hear.
- linksnapzz 1y agoYou wouldn't get a phone in 2007 that didn't lock you in to something; the question is whose ecosystem you'd prefer to deal with. I remember the Verizon crapware phone experience well.
- kotaKat 1y agoI remember when Verizon got deliberately hobbled phones on top of that. Some of the Windows Mobile phones came with up to half the RAM if you dared buy it on Verizon, and they locked the GPS out to use VZ Navigator instead of being able to just throw TomTom on 'em.
- Forgeties79 1y agoI would say their comment had a lot more nuance and thought put in to it than yours did.
- cyanydeez 1y agoI mean sure, but Androids been following Apple's lead, not tother way tround.
- consumer451 1y agoI haven't bought an android device for a few years, but the last time I did, it was also a very cheap one for testing. I chose an "Android One" to avoid all these issues. Is something like that still an option?
- robgibbons 1y agoYour best bet might be one of the Pixel "a" series, which are Google's budget-oriented models. Stock vanilla Android with as little bloat as you can hope for.
- t0bia_s 1y agoThose Pixels have options to open bootloader and after flashing custom ROM that is much cleaner (GrapheneOS) to lock it again. Which is currently most secure way to have clean and secure android device.
- jamesrr39 1y agoSounds like a Samsung phone... no end of dark patterns and pushing Bixby AI and whatever else. And then once you have the phone set up you get to spend the next 10 minutes uninstalling a load of pre-loadded apps that you didn't want. Fortunately Android is a pretty diverse range and Samsung is just one player. I had much more user-friendly experiences with Fairphone and Motorola.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThis regulation should've happened 25 years ago, because the same thing was done with laptops.
- pbiggar 1y ago[flagged]
- AlexandrB 1y agoAre you suggesting this software will somehow be able to make a phone explode? The pagers weren't just normal pagers with malware, I'm pretty sure they were loaded with actual explosives.
- zahlman 1y agoGP self-describes as "Cofounder of Tech for Palestine", so making that sort of mental association is not unexpected.
- zapataband2 1y agoIt's a pretty well established phenomenon and he cites israeli leaders. no need for ad-hominem attacks. What's your argument for allowing spyware?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vladgur 1y agohe cited a single Israeli private citizen. not Israeli leaders. The fact that a data-harvesting bloatware is installed on common handsets should be controversial enough. Both the title of this post and the link try to add "Israel is baaaad" angle as just because a company was founded in Israel. Israel is a middle-eastern tech hub that produces a lot of tech companies and innovations. Its just a numbers game that some of them will be working on things of questionable value to humanity. What GP suggesting is discriminating against all technologies developed by Israel because of his political views, nothing more.
- ngcazz 1y ago[flagged]
- hersko 1y agoSo a Unity owned bloatware company being used by Samsung is now somehow controversial because it was founded in Israel? Am i reading this right?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dogma1138 1y ago[flagged]
- tehjoker 1y agoAs a Jew, the soon as I hear "Israel" and "App" I think of Pegasus. In this genocide, the Israeli government has shown it will cross any line. Remember the pager attack? So I would like there to be zero Israeli controlled products anywhere near me. That plus everyone should be engaged in boycotts divestment and sanctions against the regime.
- trollbridge 1y agoAnd as someone who worked for multiple cyber firms out of Israel… it’s entirely reasonable to double-check that apps from Israeli firms don’t have a dual purpose to feed data to Western intelligence agencies.
- vladgur 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hyghjiyhu 1y agoEdited. This seems to be according worldwide despite the article saying it's in West Asia and Africa.
- snypher 1y agoWhy, is privacy less valuable there?
- Vinnl 1y agoIt tells readers whether they might or might not be affected.
- EasyMark 1y agoMost people don't care what stuff is being installed elsewhere, just their region as it affects them directly. I don't know how I'd get through the day if I had to keep up on news from every region of the world, other than the highlights.
- oldandboring 1y ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 1y agoSpyApps everywhere. Hopefully one day we not only have open software, open hardware but also reproducibly guaranteed secure systems. Now I don't have any idea how this could be verified (and no, Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" is not what I have in mind), but I hope we'll see to this eventually.
- johnebgd 1y agoIf you don’t trust a centralized authority you need decentralized governance…
- cyanydeez 1y agowe've alreaaaay seen that decentralization is an abstract, butnot a reality. There will always be a move towards centralization when a project gains enough converts because the bulk of concerns are exactly the same but we don't have n+1 people willing to do the necessary legwork to secure. As such, just like REST apis and their N+1 query problem, forcing everyone to have a security conscious posture is never going to happen. You absolutely need centralized authorities; what the real argume is about is how that authority is selected, changed and intermediated. The same way we argue about how a stable RAFT algorithm operates. Move on from this "decentralization is all we need" argument. It's failed and failing.
- delusional 1y ago"Decentralized governance" is just feudalism. What you need is a re-envigoration of democracy. Democracy works, but we have to engage with it positively, both as citizens and as politicians.
- johnebgd 11mo agoDecentralized decision making is pure democracy. What you see to want is representative democracy or a constitutional republic with representative democracy in the form of elected officials.
- tamimio 1y ago
- rs186 1y agoAppCloud is not only in India. It is on some OEM version of the phone in the US as well. How did I know? My phone had random notifications promoting apps that I had never heard of, and I couldn't find a way to disable them. Eventually I found and removed it via adb. These scumbags.
- keyringlight 1y agoAny chance you can remember the package name? It's not mentioned in the article or ones it linked to, and I can't quickly find it on my phone. There is the vaguely named "application recommendations" that going by a quick search should be com.samsung.android.mapsagent
- coffeecoders 1y agoI bought an Ipad yesterday. The setup was almost the same, except all the bloat was from Apple itself. Numbers, GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Pages, Clips… even the Tips app felt like bloatware. Wild how every ecosystem has its own "preloaded surprise pack."
- gruez 1y agoThose are easily deleteable though, moreover they don't install third party "recommended" apps.
- elzbardico 1y agoThey are deletable, and frankly, I wouldn't call them bloatware, they are all pretty much decent applications, they don't shove you ads down your throat and a lot of people are happy to use them.
- thehoneybadger 1y ago[flagged]
- baklavaEmperor 1y agoWhat’s striking is how often these ‘small’ surveillance tech stories trace back to the same state-aligned ecosystem. When Israel does it, it’s treated as a complex security issue. When another ‘bad’ country does the same thing, we immediately call it espionage. And almost on cue, the discussion drifts anywhere except the uncomfortable fact that it’s the same ecosystem from the same country showing up again.
- cyanydeez 1y ago[flagged]
- dirck-norman 1y ago[flagged]
- Thorentis 1y agoThe phrase "dog whistle" is also itself a dog whistle that signals where you stand on discussing particular issues in the open.
- dirck-norman 1y agoOnly someone trying to silence any dissent to their position would use platitudes like this rather than addressing why the OP mentioned antisemitism out of nowhere.
- tamimio 1y agoYou are asking the “wrong” question!! If you are Gabriele Nunziati you will be fired immediately!! For context: https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/11/05/italian-journalist-fired-for-wrong-question-brussels-willing-to-answer-everyone/ https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/11/05/italian-journalist-fired...
- crmd 1y agoit’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage. for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.
- zkmon 1y agoWhy do android phone companies load up the bloatware on their phones? Why can't they provide a plain vanilla version of android and let users to choose the stuff?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mpol 1y agoThe same reason this happens/happened on Windows laptops. The hardware provider gets money to pre-install this software. They can then offer the phone at a lower price with a higher margin.
- Melatonic 1y agoSupposedly the Pixel line of phones are pretty clean. I think a lot of this might come down to carrier deals though. Best bet I would imagine is to buy an Android device not through a carrier and make sure it has the necessary wireless modem bands
- exabrial 1y ago[flagged]
- 45955424 1y agoPlease be more specific about what you're seeing and where, as it's not apparent from this comment what you're referencing.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- Topgamer7 1y agoWhich part of this was racist? Did you even bother to even skim the article?
- KingLancelot 1y ago[dead]
- logicchains 1y ago[flagged]
- TitaRusell 1y agoIsrael wouldn't last a year without Western support. It would be nice if they remembered that. The Chinese sure as hell couldn't care less about Moses.
- Y-bar 1y agoNothing about this is antisemitic in my book. In fact I would go as far as conflating criticism of Israeli state actions with antisemitism is a sort of antisemitism since it puts both things in the same category equating both with each other (leaving no room for legitimate criticism according to the person equating them). What is antisemitism is people shouting sieg heil outside my house when they read my name on the door thinking I am Jewish (I am not, though our family fled from German forces during WW2, not all survived).
- naIak 1y agoEven worse is that Samsung phones, at least in my region, come with a "Samsung Global Goals" app installed by default; an app that serves to push a certain political agenda that many find unpalatable. Imagine if your new Xiaomi phone came with an app telling you how good the CCP is.
- donohoe 1y ago…and this, and similar stories, continues to be why I will never trust or own an Android phone.
- shauniel 1y agoWhat a trash title, literally just covering bloatware...
- german_mcdon 1y agoFor a bloatware that has been owned by a US company for years. Just originally founded in Israel. Almost like posting it has an alterior motive.
- nashashmi 1y agoActually AppCloud is a software that can install apps remotely. Not bloatware. It is spyware. And the location of the developers (example, being in China) would make it a security concern. And Israel is a security concern for countries that don't recognize Israel.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoWhy are there so many people in this thread lying about this being bloatware? It's alarming
- mdni007 1y ago[flagged]
- elzbardico 1y agoWell, apps probably won't explode.
- davesque 1y agoTL;DR Article claims AppCloud (software in question) has ties to ironSource, an Israeli-founded company now owned by US-based Unity, but never clarifies what those ties are. The author only states that an ironSource tech called "Aura" appears to do something similar to AppCloud. However, the author also points out that AppCloud isn't listed anywhere on ironSource's website. They also acknowledge that there's no evidence currently that AppCloud is doing anything weird. This looks an awful lot like an "Israel bad" article.
- daspq 1y agoHas no-one bothered to reverse engineer the app and see what it's actually doing before launching into hundreds of words of breathless conjecture? If not, this article and almost every comment on this submission is a colossal waste of time. This is supposed to be a technical website full of inquisitive hackers, right? Then perhaps try to examine the facts instead of guessing and bullshitting.
- anonymousiam 1y agoSamsung seems to have all sorts of security issues. I haven't spent any time investigating, because I believe that privacy is nonexistent, but my Samsung phones have always enabled by default, a backup of everything I have (including the removable uSD cards) to a server in South Korea. Even when I've disabled this behavior, it seems to persist at some level. I live in the US BTW.
- herbst 1y agoStop buying Samsung products