Hysterical laughter!
Reader, Inbox, Google Play Music, ...
Who is the user? Ad buyers?
"It should be easy for users to disable or uninstall software."
Does that include Android Auto, Google TV, and Youtube Music on my Pixel 5?
I would love to delete them, but I am unable to.
I agree that it would be nice if these weren't preinstalled at all but I don't find disabling to be that bad. Better than iOS for sure where the best you can do with most pre-installed apps is stuff them in a folder.
The "just pretend I'm not here :)" of software development.
It was a conscious decision to mark them as "system apps" and put them on the system partition. They didn't have to do that.
Also note that android apps are more equivalent to plugins or shell extensions than executables. An app can register various OS hooks and callbacks that can trigger behaviour even if no process of that app is running. I'm not sure all those hooks are unregistered if an app is deactivated.
My question is: WHY are they part of the read-only system image?
Is Google TV, YouTube Music, or Android Auto essential to making the phone work?
If not, why can't I delete them? It seems like monopoly power in action to me.
I am pretty sure I have none of these on any of my android devices. I have even removed the Google app.
Doesn't Chrome do this with it's constant nag popops on Search if you're using any other browser, or how it's bundled with other software?
No, that isn't tricking it piggybacking.
> or how it's bundled with other software?
Does it install without user consent?
This depends on whether you actually consider a small precheckmarked box buried 5 pages deep into a installer you are intended to mindlessly skip through clicking OK to the tiny legalese text to be consent or not
...or I guess, just do it like Chrome and don't even tell the user that you have automatic updates.
