Friday, April 25, 2014

Samsung pre-installed apps largely unused by users

For many, the act of buying a new computer is accompanied by a cleansing ritual where you spend quite a bit of time removing all the crapware it came pre-installed with it. In the smartphone space, things are unfortunately becoming a bit like that, with several brands forcing us to deal with dozens of pre-installed apps - which sometimes you can't even remove unless you resort to complex and drastic methods. But do people actually use those apps?

According to a an analytics company it doesn't seem so. Samsung has recently touted it has more than 100 million registered used in their ChatOn message service. But these statistics show that users spend, on average, just a few seconds per month using it - and the same applies to most other Samsung pre-installed apps.

S Memo and S Voice lead the pack, but even then we're talking about less than 4 minutes of use per month. For instance Samsung app store is used 1.2 minutes per month, while Google Play Store gets over 52 minutes. And apps like Instagram and YouTube get about 150 minutes; while Facebook is in a completely different league, with over 660 minutes per month.

Should this be a sign for Samsung to stop trying and duplicate features using their own apps, when there are already more popular and engaging apps and services that users prefer to use? Or, at the very least, be a sign that users should be given the freedom to easily remove any apps they don't care about, even if they come pre-installed? If you happen to have a Samsung smartphone, do let me know what you think.

1 comment:

  1. This is EXACTLY why I buy Nexus devices. I don't want bloatware.


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