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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. [...]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2023, @01:29PM
> 60GB for a phoneOS (/eyeroll).
This ^^^ for sure. I don't think it's a new problem either:
I don't have a smart phone, my road warrior days predate them and I never saw the need. My SO got a new one a couple of years ago. First she bought another Samsung because her previous one gave good service for half a dozen years. Then she tried to wade through all the pre-installed crapware and after a couple of days got disgusted and took it back to Best Buy. She put the credit toward a slightly more expensive Google Pixel model that came with much less "stuff" installed, and she's been reasonably happy since.
My guess--the ~10% premium that Google charges is the cheap way to get rid of all the Samsung crap (or, put another way, Samsung can offer a lower price because they are being paid for product placement).