Because money.
and the most delicious kind of money of all: dark money! ooooh it’s so good because the sources of the dark money offer you a lot of it, and they specifically ask you not to ask questions, which is so good for you because these bloatware programs make your device sell worse and provides no value as a sales platform because it turns out that billboards and radio spots are, surprisingly, the most effective form of advertising.
but! you have a sense of solidarity. you have faith that by never offering a phone without bloatware, your entire industry will ensure that all phones won’t have bloatware. you rest easy at night knowing your phone won’t sell poorly, at the end of the day, because every phone is like this. your contributions to a surveillance and propaganda machine that should punish you in the market because won’t because all your peers are your allies in this.
and it gets better! every time someone else’s phone gets more bloatware and more dark money attached, then everyone else appears comparatively better, allowing them to get worse. ooooh you love it so much when you get to take more dark money. and all it costs you are several thousand lives far away from your big mansion. you don’t even have to see the suffering
you have to be careful what packages you remove, some can softlock your device.
Because it’s profitable to include.
Why would companies care as much about the minor brand value decrease in the eyes of more technical users when they can make more money right now by making things shittier?
Business people don’t care what you want. They care exclusively about what they have to to do get you to accept what they want.
Anti-libre software steals our control.
It’s called enshitification. Deshitification isn’t so much a thing.
Is it really enshitification if it was like this from essentially the start?
Outside of like literally the very first few android phones when there wasn’t even apps for the platform, they came bundled with all sorts of shit. I remember my HTC from 2010 drove me insane with the junkware bundled in, and that was about 2 years post Android’s first phone. We’re at like more or less steady state shitification. (varies by phone/brand)
I used to buy my phones with a specific eye towards avoiding bloat. It was still possible to avoid most of it 8-10 years ago, but not anymore.
This is a wild take for me. I had bloatware on my dumbphone. Hell, the old nokia phones had app/ringtone dlc bullshit in them too. My old palm pilot had bloatware. Where did you get a phone without it?
What’s sad is how true this is. Companies enshitify once they have a solid hold on the market. But if they start to slip in numbers, do they ever deshitify to regain trust and users? Fuck no, they triple down on the enshitification to make one last cash grab as they prepare to abandon ship with life preservers full of bonuses for themselves