It is no secret that all smartphones carry around a lot of extra, factory-installed applications affectionately called, bloatware. Most of these applications we never use, yet they are not removable from our devices and cause our smartphone to bog down and take up precious memory. Samsung has long been called one of the worst offenders in this practice, as they want to ‘give’ us all of this great software for ‘free.’ At MWC this year, we were promised by Samsung of a ‘kinder and gentler’ TouchWiz with less bloatware, or at the least, the option of not installing their app or removing it all together. According to a XDA senior member, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge (and deductively the Galaxy S6) allows you to rid your new device of virtually all bloatware – by either disabling them or uninstalling them.
This rumor has been swirling around for quite sometime now and this move will make the Samsung Galaxy S6 series look even better than they already do…there are many people that used the bloatware excuse not to buy a Samsung device. Samsung may just be following the bloatware removal policy made mandatory in their homeland of South Korea, no less, where it is now legally compulsory to allow the deletion of bloatware. This law actually took effect with the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 4 in South Korea, although the devices shipped to the US were not afforded this luxury, but it looks like it has finally ‘trickled down’ to the new Galaxy S6 models.
We are now wondering if the new Samsung-Microsoft deal will allow those applications to be removed as well. Most likely part of the court settlement between the two giants, Samsung agreed to spread the Microsoft influence via installing Office Mobile, Microsoft OneDrive, OneNote, Skype, etc. Hopefully, we will be able to remove these applications as well.
Being able to remove these unnecessary apps from our devices without have to go through rooting the device means that more users can enjoy a bloat-free smartphone that should run faster and smoother than ever before. Some of this may also be to appease those that are upset that the microSD card slot was removed on the Galaxy S6 series, leaving the user either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. It will be much easier to accept the deletion of the card slot if the 32GBs is not filled with bloatware, but is actually usable storage space that the user can occupy with dat or their own apps and not bloatware.