Google tells Samsung to stop filling its phones with bloatware

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was one of the best smartphones released last year but it contained one major flaw: Samsung decided to lard it up with lots of gimmicky apps and features that gobbled up storage and weakened the device’s battery life. Google reportedly met with Samsung recently and told the company to stop producing so many storage-clogging, battery draining gimmick apps on future devices.

In early January, while the rest of the consumer technology world at CES marveled at the sheer size of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy tablet, Google execs were dismayed by what they saw on the screen of the massive 12.1-inch slate — a fancy new user interface called Magazine UX. As Re/code’s Bonnie Cha wrote at the time: “The Magazine UX looks like a mix of Flipboard and Microsoft’s Metro user interface with its dynamic dashboard and app shortcuts.” In other words, the interface was a dramatic departure from Google’s vision for Android.