Forget The PC, The Real Crapware Problem Is on Android

A Motorola Moto X smartphone, using Google's Android software. Mark Lennihan/AP

Bloatware, the crappy and unnecessary software that comes preinstalled on your new computer, has been around since AOL paid PC makers to roll its dial-up service into their machines back in the 1990s. But that era may be coming to a close.

Last week, the world’s largest PC maker, Lenovo, vowed to “eliminate what our industry calls ‘adware’ and ‘bloatware'” from its PCs. The company was forced to do this when it got caught sliding a seriously dangerous piece of adware called Superfish onto its laptop computers. Lenovo’s pledge is a win in the battle against bloatware. But in 2015, PCs are now a bit of a sideline skirmish. The most important front right now is Android. On phones running Google’s mobile operating system, the forces of bloatware are winning.

Android has a bigger bloatware problem than the PCs, but Google could make it go away. All it would have to do is become its own wireless carrier.

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 resource 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. 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.

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.