Anyone who's owned a smartphone over the years knows what bloatware is, even if they aren't familiar with the term. If you don't, well, it's all those useless apps that carriers and manufacturers pre-install on computers and smartphones.
Bloatware can exist for a number of different reasons. On the manufacturers' side, it's usually to add extra features that you may or may not find important. Whether that's bloatware will depend on which side of the fence you're on, we suppose.
But a big driving force is typically money, with them teaming up with developers to include the apps (or games) for a fee. In either case, it sucks, because it typically means the user gets a bunch of useless apps, and they can't even uninstall them.
Change may be on the horizon, though, with German carrier Deutsche Telekom announcing an opt-in system for customers who are tired of seeing the pollution littered throughout their home screens. DT also suggests they'll eventually let manufacturers control software updates, which potentially leads to faster rollout speeds.
All of this becomes more interesting when you consider that T-Mobile is owned by this company, and it sounds like the very kind of move that would sound good as an Un-Carrier feature. Does that mean T-Mobile will ever do it? We can't say for sure, but it certainly couldn't hurt their image and culture of empowering consumers, so we're always going to hold out hope that it's somewhere on the horizon.
via Deutsche Telekom (Translated)
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