By Vodafone pushed an update to their subscribers on the HTC Desire, recently, but it wasn’t FroYo that their phone was filled with: it was filled with Vodafone’s “360” services. Translation (according to you guys): bloatware. Vodafone – who never committed to a solid window for upgrading their Desire owners to FroYo – is under another heavy storm of customer complaints due to software which many consider is highly unnecessary and hurts the user experience more than it helps.
Vodafone 360 adds a bunch of Vodafone-branded “apps” and widgets to the user’s device which are impossible to uninstall (if you aren’t rooted, anyhow). Our inbox was chock full of you guys expressing distaste for this stuff as you claim a majority of it is useless and does nothing but pollute the app drawer with icons (hopefully the icons look decent to the naked eye).
While we can’t form an opinion on the update – we have yet to see it ourselves – we hear you guys. As far as FroYo goes, Vodafone’s trying to get you guys up to speed and have only given a timeframe of “as soon as possible”. Try not to get too raunchy with your opinions on Vodafone and this upgrade in the comments section below: we’re trying to maintain a family friendly atmosphere here, folks. ;)
Who are the brain children at these places, vodaphone, Verizon, AT&T, Moto, HTC, who thinks the public actually WANTS all this bloatware?
I always wonder why companies do this, no one likes them and it just makes the company look bad. I can only assume these apps create some type of revenue for them, though I’m not sure how.
this will accelerate move to off contract phones ha ha
Whatever revenue these apps “generate” is for sure offset by
1) the cost to develop them and
2) the subs they lose due to infuriating their customers with them.
Vodafone sucks big time. I will not renew my contract because of this.
What is up with these people and their affiliate ware? They lose their lock on charging you for basic stuff like games and ring tones, so they make up for it with crapware instead? If I want stuff I don’t need laden with commercials I’ll turn the TV on.
The only 2 carrier apps i’ve ever used are the Orange Wednesdays and Your Orange apps…both of which are from the market and not baked into the ROM, the ones that are are crap.
i’ve got the update myselfe and its as usefull as having a fish rotting in your drinking water.
These companies are counting on differentiation.
If they can get a consumer base that is comfortable with their specific apps, then that consumer base will not want to get products without those apps.
Believe it or not, this stuff works.
Well done Vodafone, this is just another nail in the coffin for me sticking with you come renewal time. I do find it funny as they have a page on their site now asking for feedback about how they can be ‘the home of the smartphone’. My suggestion for Vodafone is to stop selling Android and stick with the iSheep because they are the most useless carrier in the world when it comes to Android. Most of the suggestions on the thread revolve around not messing with the firmware or putting their own bloatware on the phones. Guess they don’t listen to their customers.
I got an HTC Magic with them before I found out it was crippled hardware, less ram and different CPU – no doubt so Vodafone could save a few pence on each handset. Since getting it I and a large amount of users on the forum have waited, and waited, and waited for any news about a 2.x update to the Magic and nothing official has every been said except some vague assertions from forum moderators to expect an update later this year which is not 2.1. Now that I have heard about the Desire getting this 360 update I am sure I know what they are talking about – It won’t be an update to Froyo, it will be a 360 bloatware update. Not for me, I have since gone ahead and rooted the phone and stuck CyanogenMod 6 on there as well as new radio and SPL so they can’t do OTA update on it. I even took off their Vodafone splash screen. Now it’s like having a new phone, and I have become a Cyanogen/custom rom convert.
Vodafone suck.
They say that Froyo is coming “as soon as possible”. I have no doubt that “as soon as possible” would come even sooner if they weren’t spending time on this stuff nobody wants.
@ImSpartacus: I think you’re right. Unfortunately, this differentiation does work in many cases. While there are some of us who would actually pay more (money) for less (stuff we don’t want in the first place), we are in the minority, and the money that carriers can rake in from the sheeple dwarfs what they could make from us.
As far as I know, Google Maps (including Navigation) is available for most, if not all, Android phones. Yet within weeks of Verizon releasing VZ Navigator for the Droid X, it has over 50,000 downloads. People are somehow convinced that they need this, and that it’s better than any of the alternatives, when in fact it’s just a re-branded version of a Networks In Motion product that is available under other names on other carriers.
I only wish they would make stuff like this easier to remove for those of us who aren’t so apathetic about it.
I aways thought that the idea was as follows:
1) Person A sees person B’s phone and likes it.
2) Person B shows person A some stuff on the phone.
3) Person A can’t help but see the logo and name of the carrier all over the place.
X)
4) Person A goes to said carrier to buy phone.
Unfortunately this relies on the mysterious step X, which involves Person A being too dumb to shop around.
And for the record I’m not finding FroYo to be all that great on my Desire. The one thing I really wanted was the ability to store applications on the SD card, but the built-in ability is so poor that I’m going to go with A2SD+ instead. In addition to this, many applications that were perfect under Eclair fail to work properly under FroYo.
Seriously, Desire owners — it’s not that bad if you don’t have it yet. In fact a delay will give devs more time to tweak their applications to interface properly with FroYo. I’m seriously considering looking into downgrading to Eclair.
@simon – you must be very unlucky. I am very happy with froyo on my desire. WiFi hot-spot works really great. Most apps work. Haven’t noticed major problems and I am still discovering more & more improvements.
@Vodafone – stop forcing users to use your crapware.
am on vodafone and ave got froyo thru manual refreshing, however my desire is unbranded and i dnt have this bloatcrap.
I just do not get why people do not just de-brand their carrier branded Desire’s. It’s so easy to do, and gives you a stock HTC ROM. I helped a couple of guys de-brand their handsets as they wanted Froyo OTA last Sunday.
The big problem for many here is that we were told by Gods reps on the Vodafone forums and/or telephone sales reps that the phone was unbranded and clean of this kind of crapware. We bought it on that basis. And then Vodafone yanked that selling point from us without warning. On top of that, the newly installed software slows the phone down and they have gone the extra mile to make it unfixable on our end. They sold us something, and then THEY broke it.
I’m leaving after my contract too.