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posted by hubie on Thursday February 09 2023, @05:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the bloatness-knows-no-bounds dept.

Samsung's Android build is 4x bigger than Google's—twice the size of Windows 11:

As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage.

Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlights in a storage space survey, Samsung's new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that's nearly half your storage for the Android OS and packed-in apps. That's four times the size of the normal Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. It's the size of two Windows 11 installs, side by side. What could Samsung possibly be putting in there?!

[...] Unlike the clean OSes you'd get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung's system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren't granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. You'll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin, and who knows what else. Another round of crapware will also be included if you buy a phone from a carrier, i.e., all the Verizon apps and whatever space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount users are reporting is 60GB, but crapware deals change across carriers and countries, so it will be different for everyone.

[...] Just on the surface, Samsung's 60GB system partition looks bad compared to the Pixel 7's 15GB, but it's actually worse than those two raw numbers. Samsung isn't even using one of the big, storage-hungry Android features that you would normally get on Pixel 7: A/B system partitions. The Pixel 7 (and most other flagships) can actually have two copies of the operating system, one that is online and being used, and another that is offline and sitting in the background. [...]


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday February 09 2023, @05:15AM (5 children)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday February 09 2023, @05:15AM (#1290840)

    At least if you could stick in a microSD card [amazon.com] you could argue that you could add more space for your own content. But how can Samsung justify marketing microSD cards when even their own phones couldn't bother to accommodate them?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @06:40AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @06:40AM (#1290847)
    The buyers also pay for that, since with a 60GB OS they are more likely to need a 256GB phone and a new phone if that 256GB fills up (many apps like whatsapp don't seem to be very good with freeing up space and you can't move them to sdcards anyway).
    • (Score: 2) by Username on Thursday February 09 2023, @07:08AM (1 child)

      by Username (4557) on Thursday February 09 2023, @07:08AM (#1290850)

      I pre-order the s23 and they wouldn't let you buy the 128gb version, you can only get the 256 "for the price of the 128"

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @08:09AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @08:09AM (#1290856)

        At this rate they're making the Chinese spyware phones look better...

        My Xiaomi only has 64GB flash. There wouldn't be space for much if the OS+spyware took up 60GB.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @11:36AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @11:36AM (#1290860)

      The Android filesystem is bizarre. Android in general is great, except for weird oversights like that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2023, @01:23AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2023, @01:23AM (#1291016)
        It's not an oversight. Years ago my android phone allowed me to move and run apps on the sdcard no matter what the app wanted. e.g. I had control over that.

        Now Google has made it harder. Supposedly for security reasons?