Flagship phones still come stuffed with junk — and most buyers don’t care
You peel the plastic off a $1,300 Galaxy S26 Ultra, tap the screen, and there it is: a folder called ‘Microsoft’, another called ‘Meta’, plus Booking.com, LinkedIn, two weather apps and something named ‘Link to Windows’ you never asked for. My first instinct was rage. Apparently, yours is a shrug — as long as the trash can be dragged to the bin.
The poll that flipped my assumption
I ran a quick poll under last week’s bloatware exposé, expecting a 90 % ‘burn-it-all’ verdict. Instead, 54 % of the 3,800 respondents said pre-installed third-party apps are fine if they uninstall cleanly. Only 11 % want the phone factory-naked. The rest sit in the meh zone: ‘I’ll delete what I don’t use, no big deal.’
That single condition — the uninstall button — is where Samsung, Xiaomi, Nothing and the rest either pass or fail. On the S26 Ultra you can nuke LinkedIn, Booking and even Facebook in under ten seconds. Try the same on a Poco X6 Pro and GetApps laughs at you: disable only. Nothing’s Phone 2a originally shipped with Instagram, Facebook and Threads welded to system partition; after a week of roasting on Reddit and X, the company pushed an OTA that finally lets owners exorcise Meta.
Why brands keep stuffing the turkey
Money, obviously. Every Netflix, Spotify or Candy Crush slot is worth between $2 and $5 per install, according to two carrier reps I pinged this morning. Multiply that by 20 million units and you’re looking at a $100 million line item that costs the user nothing — except home-screen clutter. The moment carriers and OEMs allow full removal, the price per install drops; advertisers want stickiness, not a one-night stand.
Yet the same readers who hate cable bundles suddenly tolerate app bundles when the un-install flag is set to true. The logic: ‘I was going to download Chrome and Firefox anyway, so if Samsung gives me both out of the box I just delete the loser.’ The frictionless ideal wins over ideological purity.
The real villain is immovable bloat
System-level stubs — Digital Wellbeing clones, QR scanners, ‘AI Gallery’ — that can only be disabled are the new battleground. They still eat storage, still get updates, still phone home. Google Play Services logs show even disabled apps waking up for ad-ID sync. Rooting kills SafetyNet, so average users are stuck with a digital appendix.
Samsung’s track record is actually improving: 96 % of the non-Google packages on the S26 line can be fully uninstalled, up from 62 % on the S22 series. OnePlus and Oppo still lock the ‘HeyTap’ cloud service; Xiaomi insists on ‘Mi Credit’ in India. The difference is now measured in megabytes and privacy policies, not just icons.
Bottom line: bloatware isn’t dead, it’s negotiable. Brands that refuse the uninstall option aren’t just annoying — they’re leaving money on the table from users who will simply buy the Pixel or iPhone next cycle. The poll numbers don’t lie: give us the delete key and we’ll do the curating for you. Keep the key, and we’ll keep the receipt.