Android’s openness is a big reason for its success, but cellular carriers and phone manufacturers often use this openness to make the experience worse for its users. Android’s openness gives carriers and device manufacturers the freedom to do bad things.
The Android platform is successful because carriers and manufacturers are free to produce a wide variety of different devices and customize their software. However, this is also the cause of Android’s biggest problems. Here are a few of them.
Bloatware You Can’t Uninstall
Like Windows PCs, many Android phones come with bloatware. Bloatware is software preinstalled by the phone’s manufacturer or the carrier the phone is sold on. This additional software ranges from the useful, like some of Samsung’s apps that add unique features, to the useless, like some stupid game that could easily be downloaded separately.
However useful the preinstalled software is, there’s a big problem—this software takes up space on the phone. The software is installed to the system partition, where you can’t normally remove it—just like you can’t normally uninstall Gmail and other important apps that come with the Android OS. Bloatware can often take up a large amount of space, especially on phones with limited storage out of the gate, like most budget handsets. Ample storage has long been reserved for premium devices, and that has yet to change.
Preinstalled apps can be disabled, but that doesn’t free up any space.
You can only remove them with a root-only app like the powerful Titanium Backup or by installing a custom ROM.Skins You Can’t Disable
Android manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, and others change the look of the Android operating system, tweaking it to use a different launcher (home screen), theme for included apps, and more. Manufacturers have to modify Android’s code to do this, and they make it impossible to use the default interface if you prefer it.
On Samsung devices, Samsung’s TouchWiz is the only included interface. Sure, you can install a third-party launcher—like the popular Nova Launcher that functions similarly to the default stock Android launcher—but manufacturers deprive you of the choice of using true stock Android on your device. There are, however, some things can you do to make your Galaxy phone feel a bit more like stock Android—keep in mind, however, this is mostly just a band-aid fix.
If you really want to use stock Android, you will have to install a custom ROM like LineageOS. Otherwise, you’re stuck with the manufacturer’s interface…
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