South Korean smartphone users should see a hefty reduction of pre-installed bloatware on their devices from April. The country's Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning issued a press release late last week detailing new industry guidelines concerning this issue.
The new guidelines say that mobile operators will have to make most of the pre-installed apps removable - except for those deemed necessary for Wi-Fi connectivity, NFC and the customer service centre. It's reasonable that some telcos will have special apps for users to connect to their particular network services during their travels. Also a non-removable app store of the telco's choice will be able to be pre-installed with no user options to remove it.
The ministry's press release explained the purpose of the legislation: "The move aims to rectify an abnormal practice that causes inconvenience to smartphone users and causes unfair competition among industry players," reports ZDNet which translated a Korean language official communication. Furthermore the ministry asserts that your smartphone will benefit from this cutting of the fat and deliver more user-storage capacity and better battery life.
In a specific example of the impact of these guidelines, upon a popular handset in Korea today, the Yonhap News Agency reported that The Samsung Galaxy S4 from SK Telecom would have its bloat cut in half. It says that this smartphone model has 25 SK Telecom specific apps, 39 apps from Samsung and 16 from Google; that's 80 apps to clutter up the smartphone that may not be wanted nor required. Technical Android users can clean their devices of such software through rooting and installing 'cleaner' OS releases but the majority of users just put up with this unwanted unused software and its updates.
