• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    31 year ago

    Genuine question here, where are people buying phones that have all of this crap installed on them?

    I have only ever bought unlocked phones directly from the manufacturer (pixel, nexus) or from a retailer like best buy and I have never had any carrier crap like this and I started with the nexus one.

    I just get the phone and either transfered the physical sim or transferred the sim digitally, at no point has a carrier ever had the ability or permission to install apps on my phone.

    I guess maybe because I never saw the point in buying carrier locked phones and always viewed that as a weird arbitrary lockdown(like buying a car that you can only drive on certain highways), I just avoided this? Is that where the bloat ware comes in?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      When you buy them from mobile phone companies(T-Mobile, at&t,etc .)you get their bloat ware. This why I also get mine from the manufacturer. Fuck all that bloat ware and it’s unlocked as well.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I bought an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer and still didn’t get the choice.

      Inserting a SIM card wiped the phone and provisioned it, installing all sorts of carrier-provided apps with system-level permissions.

      As far as I’ve found, there’s a few possible solutions:

      • Unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM that doesn’t automatically install carrier-provided apps. (Warning: This will blow the E-fuse on Samsung devices, disabling biometrics and other features provided by their proprietary HSM).

      • Manually disable the apps after they’re forcibly installed for you. Install adb on a computer and use pm disable-user --user 0 the.app.package on every app you don’t want. If your OEM ROM is particularly scummy, it might go out of its way to periodically re-enable some of them, though.

      • Find a SIM card for a carrier that doesn’t install any apps, then insert that into a fresh phone and hope that the phone doesn’t adopt the new carrier’s apps (or wipe the phone) when you insert your actual SIM.