Everyone hates bloatware, and yet companies continue to fill our smartphones with it. It’s practically impossible to have a pure, unblemished Android experience thanks to the fact that companies like Samsung love dumping their crappy bloatware onto their devices. Fed up with this, a Chinese consumer protection group has decided to sue Oppo and Samsung for their bloatware.
For years, Samsung (and other Android manufacturers) have been crapping all over Google’s simple software design with layers of gratuitous bloatware. So, in the proud American tradition, a Chinese consumer protection group is suing Samsung and Oppo for ruining everyone’s lives. As the Shanghai Daily reports, the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission has filed two cases, one against Samsung and one against Chinese manufacturer Oppo, alleging that the companies sell smartphones with pre-installed apps (true) that are difficult or impossible to uninstall (very true), and typically annoy consumers (yup). Bloatware isn’t a problem unique to Samsung or Oppo — far from it, sadly — but the commission chose those two following a study of 20 smartphones, which found that Samsung and Oppo were the worst offenders. They found the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 had 44 apps installed prior to purchase, while the Oppo X9007 had 71.
Cell phones are not the only consumer problem. I recently purchased a new laptop with Win 8.1 installed. The first time I used Internet Explorer I got a warning message from the trial antIvirus program that a nasty virus program was operating on my system and Explorer was acting like there was a virus creating havoc, I was being asked to purchase the product in order to get rid of the virus. Very annoying popup which wouldn’t go away, just kept reappearing while I was trying to visit other sites. I got so fed up I shut down Explorer, removed it from the desktop and installed Google Chrome instead, solved the problem. Then I had the laptop scanned for viruses for free, there was no virus at all on my laptop, I was being lied to by this sample virus program. Even after removing the virus sample software some elements still remained and popups still kept appearing on the desktop warning of impending disaster if I did not purchase the program. I would think that this type of marketing ploy would be illegal.
What do you think?