Android as Windows

I have commented before about how Android handset advertising resembles the worst sort of PC advertising.

Now it seems Samsung has gone all the way and infests their phones with crapware - I mean, “valuable software pre-installed for your convenience”: Samsung Galaxy S5 Comes With Premium App Subscriptions.

Whoever at Samsung thought this was a good idea should be used as target practice for the company’s autonomous guard-bots (no, really, those are a thing). One of the factors driving people away from Windows is the fact that most “civilian” installations come loaded down with all sorts of horrors: unkillable system tray cruft, toolbars cluttering up every window, a brace of expired trials for vapourware security products, and various broken installs of different versions of antivirus tools. Corporate Windows images are not much better, with encryption watchdogs, twenty passwords required, and disk audits and mandatory reboots happening at the most inconvenient times.1

Faced with this sort of user experience, most people run away screaming - often to Apple. Now Samsung wants to bring this same dynamic to mobile?

  1. Android purists will no doubt point out that it possible to install clean Android here. In the real world, I suspect that about as many people will do this as already reinstall clean Windows to their consumer boxes - i.e. only us weirdos. ↩