One of the most nefarious practices among manufacturers is loading their devices with harmful and irrelevant software. Consumer complaints keep multiplying, but the situation hasn't improved. Finally, someone decided to take the bloatware problem to court. The Consumer Rights Protection Commission in Shanghai has sued Samsung and Chinese manufacturer Oppo for the lamentable selection of apps on their phones.
The first question concerning bloatware is "why". Why would a manufacturer voluntarily reduce performance on one of its products by loading heavy, limited programs, exasperating who should be a happy user after buying their new system? The answer is the same as always: Money. The manufacturer receives a specific payment for including bloatware on its computers, tablets and smartphones, completely ignoring consumer rights. On computers, removing bloatware is possible but requires time and patience. However, the story changes on Android mobile devices. Many of these apps offer no option to be uninstalled, as they resort to the dirty trick of being declared "system applications". While there are tools capable of uninstalling those apps (Titanium Backup is a good example), root access is unavoidable.
The point is that consumers shouldn't tolerate this (nor take on the role of engineer to fix the manufacturer's mess), and that has led the Consumer Rights Protection Commission in Shanghai to sue both Samsung and Chinese manufacturer Oppo for including bloatware on their devices. The commission based its complaints on a study of 20 smartphones, with Samsung and Oppo being the worst offenders. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 comes with 44 additional preinstalled apps, and the Oppo X9007 has 71 external apps. Limited dictionaries, online shopping programs, and games are some of the apps preinstalled by manufacturers.
What the commission seeks with these lawsuits is not financial compensation, but to force companies to publish the complete list of preinstalled apps on each of their smartphones, as well as provide accurate information on how to safely uninstall each of them. Samsung and Oppo have 15 days to present their defense, and if everything goes as planned, the court will announce the corresponding dates for the process. Shanghai is a bit far, but I hope this causes a domino effect and similar lawsuits arise in other countries. The presence of bloatware harms the user from every point of view.
