Newsletter 
We’ve been hearing all week that carriers have removed some apps in favor of others on their variant of Samsung’s flagship devices. It appears that both Verizon and AT&T have decided to remove the Microsoft apps that are pre-installed on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. That includes OneNote and OneDrive. While you can just go into the Play Store and install them if you want. There’s another problem. This means that you can’t get the 100GB of free storage from OneDrive on the Galaxy S6 or Galaxy S6 Edge.
It’s sad how much power carriers have over manufacturers – especially one as big as Samsung – when it comes to what’s installed on their variant of Samsung’s flagship device. While Verizon and AT&T did get rid of Microsoft’s apps, T-Mobile and Sprint opted to keep them on their devices. Microsoft was sort of counting on working with Samsung to pre-load their apps on their newest flagship devices. They inked a deal just last month to do so. It’ll be interesting to see if anything changes now that we know that AT&T and Verizon have removed Microsoft’s apps.
Microsoft has had a lot of trouble with their own mobile ecosystem. Their Windows Phones have never really sold well, and they’ve decided to change their stance and become more of a services company, offering their services on Android and iOS. Which is something Google has been doing for a while now. Most Google apps are now available on iOS now, as well as Android. Microsoft recently brought Office over to iOS and Android, and having two of their apps pre-installed on the Galaxy S6/Galaxy S6 Edge, was supposed to help them quite a bit. However, with the two biggest carriers opting to remove those apps, it may not help them as much as they had hoped.
As expected, Samsung, Verizon and AT&T wouldn’t explain to the WSJ why they don’t have Microsoft’s apps pre-installed on those two carriers variants of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. Probably not a big deal to most people, unless you use OneDrive and were hoping to get that 100GB of free storage.