alt Hacker NewsNot sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too.
It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them. Android, because of the whole OEM story, of course is much worse, but I don't feel like any of what you share is new, been going on for decades at this point.
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mitchell209 • today at 11:06 AM
You can delete almost all apps on iOS except the obviously core apps that are necessary for it to function.
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And operators preloading questionable stuff is a much older practice than post-iPhone smartphones. If you had a feature phone in the 2000's, the operator would have customised it one way or another. The iPhone was revolutionary in how much Apple forced the network operators to relinquish control.