I got a new phone recently. My old one was a Oneplus which worked well for a couple of years, but with several issues on the battery I decided to just move on and get a new one, and after some looking around, I ended up going back to having a Samsung phone, even though I said in the past that I would move away from them due to bloatware issues. Now, I realized not long after that claim that all modern devices come with a large amount of software you don’t actually want, so I figured I might as well go back to a phone brand that I know worked well for me in the past.
I was immediately disappointed by how much garbage gets thrown in your face when you get a new phone. I was not ready for this. After I got over the initial worries of setting over all of my authenticator apps, which nowadays is almost the primary function of my phone alongside being a glorified mp3 player. Or walkman, if you’re old like me. Then again, mp3 player is also old, I suppose none of my kids would really know what it is nowadays. Perhaps I’ll ask them.
But since I got this new phone I’ve had to uninstall – alongside a bunch of Samsung and Google specific apps that I will never use – and not limited to:
- A Temu app
- TikTok
- A bunch of random video games
- Netflix
- Several different AI apps, most of which you can’t fully disable
I paid for the phone, it’s my phone, but it doesn’t feel like I really own it, it feels like I own the casing, but what appears on my screen I don’t get to really decide. Open messaging app? Use Gemini to predict what kind of messages you’re going to send.
Open google? Would you like us to predict what you’re going to google?
Open Google Sheets. Would you like to use AI? What? To predict how many words I’m going to write today.
Like most things in life, this almost immediately turned into a rant about AI, and more of those are definitely coming in the future, but one thing I was actually pleasantly surprised by is the fact that despite my worries, I was actually able to uninstall a vast majority of these apps and after a couple of hours of consistent scrubbing and checking for new sneaky apps that might have found a way into the phone, I believe it’s now mostly cleared out of apps I won’t use. I’m not a big phone user. When I’m at work, I hardly have the time to use my phone and even when I do, I usually just try to get some work done on my laptop instead, where I also have access to Youtube and Discord. At home I mostly use it to ignore calls and sometimes read manga, so one fun thing I’d like to do is show my teenage students my daily screentime and watch them try to understand how it’s so low. I don’t tell them I spend all day behind my computer like a gremlin because that would ruin the tiny bit of respect they might still have left for me. Phones honestly should just be a way to ignore calls, listen to music and use for Google Maps. Any extra functions it has are a bonus and the less ways it has to annoy me, the better. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 