OnePlus is bogging its phones down with unremovable Facebook bloatware
Remember back in the early days of the smartphone where carriers would install all kinds of bloatware on devices sold through their channels? For the most part, this practice has kind of stopped, or at least it isn’t as bad as it once was, but unfortunately it looks like OnePlus users have to contend with another kind of bloatware – Facebook.
This is according to a tweet by XDA’s Max Weinbach who discovered that the Instagram app on his OnePlus phone was updating through a Facebook App Manager instead of the Play Store, where one would normally expect to see app updates. Android Police dug further and discovered that this Facebook App Manager tool is present on the company’s more recent handsets that are shipped with OxygenOS.
According to OnePlus, they claim that by using the Facebook App Manager, it will apparently offer “better battery efficiency”, although we can’t really see why that would be the case. They also allege that this would allow for enhanced HDR playback on Netflix.
I hate this so much pic.twitter.com/0cViyKaMGV
— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) August 1, 2020
The bad news is that you can’t even uninstall them. While you can remove the individual apps like Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger, you cannot remove the installers themselves, although you can disable them if you wish. OnePlus does not seem to think that the use of these installers is bad and have stated that they will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
Source: Android Police