Storage Monopoly

[Android Question]

Who cares what company is offering what deal on any new or old smart phone? Android was my first smart phone I have ever bought.But after owning it I'm seeing what others who use to have them are complaining about.Phone Storage is the main complaint everyone I have talk to has with the Android phones.There is so much crap in the phones storage that there is no room to add anything else.Don't bother trying to uninstall many of them because that is an option owners aren't given.Nor are they given the option to move it to a SD card to free up storage.Instead owns of The Android Phones are forced to store unwanted and unnecessary data that limits them from accessing many of their favorite sites that require more storage than what is available.This monopoly over the customer's freedom of storage and is why Android is losing more people in the long run.Not because some other company has a better phone but because other companies give their customers the freedom over what consumes their storage.Customers aren't even given the option to be their own administer over the phones but instead are only given the option to allow Android to be the administer who claims they can lock your screen,change your pass word,and delete all your files and to do so without warning.So my question is,"Why even bother buying a Android Phone?".

 

[Hadron]

The pre-installed apps which you can't remove live in a different partition, so removing them doesn't actually free up space for the user. Clearing their data does, and you should be able to disable them if running Android 4.0, which will prevent them from loading more data.

You don't say what phone you have and on what network, but usually it's the network who add a lot of the bloatware (Verizon Wireless, in the US, have the worst reputation for this, but most others do it to lesser degrees). Buying phones off-contract from the manufacturer reduces the amount of this bloat, but then you pay the full price for the phone.

The other thing you can do is root the phone, which gives you administrator access and allows you to deal with this as you like (including uninstalling unwanted system apps). The procedures depend on the phone model, so you should research it specifically for your phone. We have forums for particular devices here if you want to look for more information, especially the "All Things Root" section in each device forum. Some networks/manufacturers will consider the warranty void if the phone has been rooted, which is something else you should check. But many of us do this, and "removing bloatware" and "being in control of my own device" are two of the commonest reasons.

And why bother? Well speaking personally I don't have a bloat problem (I buy off-contract phones, and then root and customise further), and I appreciate the greater customisability of Android, and the wider choice of hardware, than I get from other smartphone platforms.

 

[Rukbat]

A phone is like a car in some ways. My VW Bug can't do 0-60 in 5 seconds, and it's not manouverable doing hairpins at 150. My Porsche can do either.

If you buy the bottom of the line, "it's cheap, but it's an Android". phone, you're not going to get much speed, you won't be able to install much on it and it won't do a lot that other phones will do. My Samsung Precedent (it's selling for about $50 now) is like that. Without rooting and an Area51 ROM, the phone is about as useful as the Motorola V551 I bought in 2003.

My Note 3, OTOH, does 0-60 in nothing flat. I'm a software junky, and download 5 or 6 different apps to see which one I prefer, then delete the ones I don't like. I haven't started deleting anything from the Note - the difference between "total storage" and "available storage" is about a dot. Oh, some day I'm going to run out of room, but not the way I did with the Precedent on about the second day.

Don't blame the phone for being what it is. Compare the cheapest Android to what we had 10 years ago (we could actually take pictures - and send them to other people, as long as they were on the same carrier) and you'll realize that, although there's plenty of room for improvement, we've come a really long way. It took over 50 years for the car to become something everyone had - Android is only a few years old.