The end of bloatware is near: the European Union studies its elimination

Not so long ago, in Spain, operators had such decision-making power over our smartphone buying habits that they could afford to flood our mobiles with applications that we did not want.

That has changed, but even today, both in our country and in many others, brands include the applications and services they see fit, without the user being able to do anything to avoid it.

Surely you have bought a mobile of any brand and have seen that it comes with an application store that you will never use, duplicate calendar, clock or agenda apps and much more. That’s bloatware, which we’ve talked about more than once.

Europe wants users to be able to uninstall the manufacturer’s apps

Well it seems that this reality would be coming to an end with the drafting of a law called Digital Services Act, according to the Financial Times. This regulation seeks to avoid the dominant position of some firms that sell devices such as mobiles or computers, and that use this priority access to users to try to position their apps and services.

Huawei’s controversial plan to survive: sell mobiles with more bloatware?

Huawei looks like it will have a tough 2020 without Google, but the company is not giving up. One of their plans would be to put up to 70 more apps on their mobiles.

This is something so normal that it is strange to us that the European Union is against it. The intention of regulators is force device manufacturers to allow uninstallation of these applications.

In addition, they are studying the impossibility of companies reaching agreements to exclusively install certain apps and services on the mobile phones of a manufacturer.

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In many analyzes we have mentioned in a negative way the agreements that many brands signed with companies such as Gameloft or Facebook to install their apps as standard. But the problem was not that, it was when we are not allowed to remove them from the system.

Not only is it bloatware, there will be more news

This law will also have repercussions in other ways. European executives want large companies that have access to user data to be forced to share it with smaller rivals, preventing the size of the companies from being a guarantee that no one will be able to stand up.

At the moment this legislation is taking its first steps and it will take months to see the final draft and even more to see it applied in our day to day.

Cover image by Frederic Köberl.

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