Tin margins make consumer electronics a cutthroat market

   Take Jared Burrows, a software developer with Northrop Grumman who’s written a few Android apps of his own. Burrows runs a custom script that yanks about two dozen unwanted programs off of his Android phone, he says. He hates all that unwanted software, and for good reason. “I do not like things running in the background because it causes my battery to run down, and it’s always using data,” he says.

Bloatware is a bigger headache on Android phones than it is on PCs for multiple reasons, says Irfan Asrar, a researcher with mobile security company Appthority. “Not only is it harder to remove (every time you do a factory reset it will come back), but it’s costing you resources such as data usage and battery drainage as well as pushing the boundaries on privacy,” he said in an email to WIRED.

Fix This, Google—Please!

Tiny margins make consumer electronics a cutthroat market, Asrar says. As a result, bloatware lures device manufactures with a tempting additional revenue stream that comes from asking app developers and publishers to pay up for the privilege of being distributed with the phone. “In some cases this also helps subsidize the price of the device,” Asrar says.

What’s worse, Droidland has not one source of bloatware but two. Handset makers like Samsung and HTC love to pre-install their own apps. Then carriers like Verizon or AT&T do the same thing. My Samsung Galaxy Note, for example, shipped with pre-installed messaging software from Google, Samsung, and Verizon reparacion de telefonos chinos españa . That’s excessive.

But if Android has a bigger bloatware problem than the PCs, Google could make it go away. All the maker of the world’s most popular mobile operating system would have to do is become its own wireless carrier.

Google’s Nexus phones are already the most bloatware-free Android handsets out there. If Google then becomes a wireless carrier itself—an “experiment” that’s in the works, the company said yesterday—then it could also cut out the carrier-level junk and build a phone that’s completely bloatware free moviles chinos 4g baratos.

Apple keeps its phones largely free of this unwanted software by exerting rigorous control over what can and cannot get installed on its own hardware. Yanking this much control away from the phone companies by delivering a phone unsullied by their crappy add-ons was a big breakthrough. But as a mobile carrier, Google would have more control of the final product than even Apple. It would be the only company to oversee every stage of the mobile market: from coding the base software to building the handsets to controlling the little white boxes that get sent out to customers.

With that much power, maybe Google could give the world the kind of Android phones we really want: the kind that doesn’t come filled with crap from the moment we turn them on.