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Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

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391 points croes | 2 comments | 17 Nov 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.388s | source
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duxup ◴[17 Nov 25 17:00 UTC] No.45955483[source]▶
I recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account.

What a horrible experience you get with some providers and phones.

It's to the point that I think there should be some sort of regulation that involves you getting a baseline experience on the OS rather than a bunch of malware out of the box.

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atonse ◴[17 Nov 25 17:01 UTC] No.45955502[source]▶
My guess is, those auto installs is exactly how they keep the costs down, by subsidizing the cost with getting paid by companies to auto-install garbage.

It's the same with Smart TVs, they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff the manufacturers do, like sell your watch data, or pre-install apps.

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elsjaako ◴[17 Nov 25 17:05 UTC] No.45955540[source]▶
I've heard this theory before, but is an individual data point really worth enough to make this argument?
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1. montjoy ◴[17 Nov 25 17:25 UTC] No.45955766[source]▶
You need to think about the aggregate data. Whole trends can be seen in almost real-time.

Here’s a made up example, and it’s probably not even the best one. - Show Teckno-Detectives shows a “Cameo” of Grapple’s newest mixed-reality glasses. The data shows that 3.9 million additional people watched the episode. Investment firms who pay for the data notice and buy extra Grapple shares to cash in on the expected sales bump.

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2. elsjaako ◴[20 Nov 25 16:11 UTC] No.45994197[source]▶
Yes, but to make it worthwhile you need a lot of data and the price scales linearly.

Let's say my phone gets $10 cheaper because of all this crap ware. If you have the aggregate of 1000 people that cost someone $10000. Is that really worth it? Is 100000 people worth $1000000? Is there some point at which the aggregate data becomes so valuable it overtakes the per-user cost?

That's what I mean - the marginal value of one person needs to be quite big for this whole thing to make sense.