Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe the Android guy in today's episode of the Android guy weekly we're going to talk about bloatware the good the bad and the ugly at the end of every episode of the Android guy weekly we always ask you to comment to participate and then to send in suggestions or questions that we can cover in upcoming episodes well this one and I apologize in advance I'm probably gonna get your name wrong this question comes from Lauren - and says what do you think about built-in apps on Android devices starting with launchers like TouchWiz since etc daily apps like memo takers voice recorders email clients keys air and the corresponding widgets for these applications many refer to them as bloatware while I find them useful and better integrated with the OS than third-party apps so what is bloatware bloatwares a term that carries over from the pc days when manufacturers will put the operating system on the drivers on and then a whole bunch of crap that they usually got paid by the people who wrote the crap to put on and i'm sorry if you're one of those people who wrote the crap a lot of those programs were pretty decent I just want the opportunity to install them myself and not have to live with them being installed now why is that a problem well it's not a problem per se but ok it is a problem and here's why when you have a desktop PC you've got a relatively large hard drive you've got a relatively large amount of RAM and a relatively powerful processor and ideally a really hefty video processor as well so when all these programs are installed they're occupying some of that space but hey it's a big hard drive so it doesn't matter that much if they're running in the background well you've got a lot of RAM so it doesn't matter that much you've got you know fast processor so it doesn't matter that much but when you start adding them up and get 10 and 12 and 15 and who knows how many of these apps running all the time well it starts to become a problem and what's even a bigger problem is when people are doing that on mobile devices your phone or your tablet you have significantly less storage significantly less RAM and significantly less processor than you do on a desktop PC but we're going kind of the same way with having this bloatware installed on our handheld devices and it's really not cool because what slowed us down a lot on the desktop slows us down a lot on mobiles we don't like that at all because we like quick fast Mobile's all-in-all bloatware shouldn't be a problem because in most cases going back to desktops now you can just uninstall it it might take a while and if you're not a really savvy user you might not know that you need to go in and clean up when you get your brand-new computer and that would be like getting a brand new car and having to empty the truck from with all the bricks that they load it in there so you can get the the mileage that was advertised it's just ridiculous but you could still do it over on our mobile devices most of the time those apps are installed as system devices or system apps rather so you can't uninstall them because guess what you don't have root they don't trust you enough to take that stuff off so if you've got a Verizon device and you don't want NFL ticket do bad it's on there and you've got to live with it and it's gonna go out and try and update and it might be running in the background it gets you know scores and highlights and whatnot and it might be telling you all this even if you don't like it now I don't know who doesn't like American football but let's say you are that one person out there that doesn't and you want to get rid of it you can't because it's bloatware so let's go back to the question now what about these other apps that come pre-installed they're pretty good like voice recorders like note-taking apps hey some of them are very very nice and really should be across the board every device should have those but they're useful so back to the PC metaphor notepad calculator paint comes with every version of Windows out there since like version 2 and they're useful and they're small and they don't get in the way and when they do that and they they serve one function and do it well I still use notepad today if I need to hurry and quick take a note no problem start run notepad done got it same thing with calc I need to calculate something really quick start run count done very easy start run paint I just like saying it start red can you tell so or start run pocketnow.com bam so what about these on handhelds okay on handhelds yes I can see that and I can like that but I still want to be able to remove them on a desktop I can't really remove those because their system apps same thing on handouts their system apps I can't remove them but if they're useful I don't mind as much I think most of you probably wouldn't mind as much where it gets problematic is when you get all these branded apps and I'm picking on Verizon because the Verizon phones that I've reviewed recently have had half a dozen or more Verizon branded apps then a whole bunch of other apps and it's really not cool to do that let me uninstall those at the very least let me remove them from my phone that I bought let me take those off if I'm not gonna use them I don't want it they're taking up space even if I'm not running and you know if it's not running in the background I don't want it on the phone just let me clean it off on a desktop PC I could format the thing and reinstall windows great now it's clean woohoo I have a little bit of a problem installing drivers and whatnot because maybe they didn't ship a nice driver CD with the computer but I can still do that with my Android phone the only way that I can do that is to route it install a custom recovery and install a custom ROM which I don't know if you know me very well hi I'm Joe the Android guy yeah that's what I do primarily for that reason makes it go fast cleans it up lets me do all kinds of stuff so the last topic in that question was launchers now the launcher as we know is the app that launches your apps it holds the icons that holds the widgets it holds the app drawer it's the part that holds everything together and once you launch stuff out but in most cases the launcher also includes other stuff as well or it's closely tied into other apps for example on HTC Sense you've got your contacts your dialer your email you know stuff like that your calendar that all look like since so if you want to put in a new custom launcher now you've got to find new custom apps for those as well that look more like stock and let's face it that's relatively difficult to do and to do it right you're gonna have to spend some money sure it's only like 2 3 bucks per app but you're still gonna have to spend money to do it just so you can get rid of the stuff that came with your device that you didn't want because you wanted stock or you wanted the freedom to have something else can you do it yes is it as fluid and as seamless no and that's unfortunate unless you get a whole launcher suite like SPB SPB has put together a pretty good desktop and it does a lot of stuff if you like it it's great if you don't like it not so great it does cost like 15 bucks to get so if you want to try it hopefully that 15 minute refund window is long enough for you to install it and set it as your default and configure it and play with it and see it's not long enough to do all that don't even try but that's the point why can't I say you know what I want to go 2 cents from my stock android and buy it in the market and it has all of this stuff in it and if I want to switch to something else no problem I go in the market and I I'm sorry the Play Store that's gonna be a hard habit to break why can't i buy Motorola's from the Play Store and put it on my device and run it why can't I do that because it's bloatware because it's too tightly coupled in and because that's the branding that differentiates everything well I'd argue it would probably be good if they let you buy stuff to customize your phone how you want it I mean wouldn't it be cool if you had a Samsung phone running a Motorola Watcher I think Motorola be all over that and Samsung wouldn't be cool if your TouchWiz was running on a Droid Maxx yeah so go ahead and do this guy's put your launchers the whole thing out into the market the Play Store now doing that is gonna do two things one it's gonna let people choose what they want to run two it's gonna let people remove what they don't want to run and three it's going to decouple the launchers from the core operating system such that well now if we want to upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich no problem we upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich and then all on that launcher stuff is just an app that sits on top of it that can be patched and updated through the Play Store no problem let's do that and then can we start getting some updates to phones a little bit faster I hope okay so that was a topic for today bloatware the good the bad and the ugly and you know I'm a little bit biased and think most of its ugly but like the person who wrote in some of it's not bad so I'd like to know what's your favorite bloatware what comes prepackaged on your phones that you like and wouldn't know what you could do without or would have a hard time doing without if you switch to another phone that didn't have that pre-installed let us know that down in the comments of course make sure you give the video a big thumbs up so that your friends know that you're watching subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episodes of the Android guy weekly and of course head on over to pocketnow.com so you can not only get news tips articles but editorials and all kinds of cool stuff on other platforms not just Android for PocketNow and the android guy weekly I'm Joe Levi