It’s obvious how you haven’t even touched a Samsung phone in the past 10 years and are just repeating misinformation. Carrier phones with preinstalled bloatware is a thing, but Samsung mostly did it in the heyday if Facebook and Twitter integration with data plans in the US circa 2015. Newer phones and international versions have never had preinstalled social media apps, let alone installed at system level. This was a widespread issue at the time with all phones, from Motorola to ASUS, and yes, even Apple. Not a Samsung exclusive issue.
Currently, even Samsung applications can be uninstalled. There’s ads, on the Galaxy store, where you are supposed to have ads. They are no more intrusive than looking at recommended apps on the Play store or the AppStore.
There’s one bit of dark pattern left, and it is after major upgrades, Samsung will show a notification suggesting to install recommended apps. But you can touch “don’t show this again” and it goes away forever. I’ve never seen an ad on my s24 phone ever.
So, my suggestion is to not blindly trust everything you hear on the internet. No matter how geeky and knowledgeable the people may seem. Just find variety and diversity of POVs to form a more complex and nuanced opinion, even seek personal experience. Not just stay with a single person’s biased opinion. And definitely don’t parrot loudly something that you have no first hand experience with.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Not going to shill for Samsung, it has it’s problems, but to answer your question I happen to use one and I don’t have a Facebook app. I don’t remember if it was not preinstalled or if it was able to be uninstalled and I did when I got the phone, but I don’t have the app. Either way there is definitely no unremovable third-party bloat. But there is a bunch of first-party bloat though, like Samsung Cloud, Samsung Checkout, Samsung Keyboard, etc, and it can’t be completely uninstalled. I haven’t seen any apps being downloaded to my phone automatically, but I’m not logged in to a Samsung account so maybe that’s why.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I don’t mind the vendor stuff to much as long as it gets out of your way. I just would be so annoyed to see random 3rd party stuff on the phone especially if it automatically installed.