Deutsche Telekom is getting rid of pre-installed provider apps and is letting the customer choose which apps to install on their new devices, something which is not usually available from carrier’s which do pre-load apps onto phones before packaging and selling them. For subscriber’s of DT’s network in Europe, this means no more DT apps on devices upon powering the phone up for the first time, unless those apps coming from DT are desired by the user. What’s more, is that since Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile in the U.S. it’s quite likely that this change will make its way to T-Mobile customers as well in the future, though there has been no confirmation of such a change at this point.
Choosing which apps that come from the provider to install will happen during the initial setup process of the phone, and users will be able to choose some or even none of the apps if they would rather not have any of them. According to Deutsche Telekom this change will also enable firmware updates to come straight from the manufacturer and not from itself, which means faster turnaround times for software upgrades for users, and this is a good thing as software updates having to come from the carrier tends to lengthen the process of receiving those updates.
There are a number of phones that DT already offers which will be part of this change, including the Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, and Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus, as well as the Xperia XZ1 Compact from Sony, the Huawei P10, P10 Plus, and P10 Lite, and all of Google’s Pixel devices in addition to a handful of others. This change should already be live for DT customers, and anyone on the network who goes to buy a new phone from the carrier should be given the opportunity to bypass installing any DT apps, so long as the phone is one of the ones that isn’t branded. This also means that all phones offered on DT’s network going forward will be free of branding and pre-installed apps.