-BEFORE POSTING ABOUT THE 'ANNOUNCEMENT' READ BOTTOM OF THIS POST-
I've understood that Verizon is getting some money by putting apps on our phones from other companies, but with the recent announcement that the Bionics are going to be discontinued, we can expect less updates and Bionic-specific accessories. With that being said, and I've never been one to appose Bloatware before, but I've looked through these apps, I've looked through the reviews of these apps, and I've seen the light: we should have options for these apps.
On my phone:
Verizon Video takes up 20.59M
NFL Mobile takes up 14.64M
Verizon Navigator takes up 9.77M
Citrix takes up 8.58M
They continually decrease, but there are more apps than just that—those are the big ones, and we have a fixed set amount of storage. I know every phone has preinstalled apps, but I believe Verizon has the most Bloatware as far as big-league phone companies. I've seen in the comments of the Bloatware that many people are giving one star ratings and actually "boycotting" app updates.. Whether boycotting actually has an impact on Verizon, we don't know, but the ratings are low for Bloatware apps.
As quoted by the many who have said this before: Speak Out while you still can. We're not going to be receiving many more updates, I'd like to see the day when Bloatware are just optional apps.
Open for petition, discussion, and debate.
EDIT: Indeed, they are only RUMORS that the Bionics are going to be discontinued. But True or False, we need to have more say in our phones because as the Bionic ages month by month, we will hear less and less about updates.
Sent from my DROID BIONIC using DroidForums
I'm not a fan of bloatware either. It's one of the main reasons I decided to root. I currently have 40+ apps frozen.
Personally I would like to see Moto give us the option of freezing or disabling apps without having to root. ICS has this feature so maybe it will be included with the ICS update. Of course, Moto could always remove that feature in their "Blurwich" implementation and I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
Having said that, I disagree with some of your assumptions. Others have covered the fallacious "Bionic is being discontinued" rumor so I won't waste time on that. But even if it was discontinued, what makes you think Moto would stop supporting it? The Droid X has been out since July 2010, and was superseded by the Droid X2 in May 2011, and a major bugfix update was released for it just this week! Hell, even the OG Droid received an OTA update 2 months ago -- and it's over 2 years old!
Moreover, I'm not sure what makes you think an update would fix the problem. The .902 update actually added MORE bloatware (Amazon MP3, MOG Music, Slingbox, VZW Apps, the list goes on). It is possible that the ICS update will help, assuming Moto doesn't disable that feature, but that would be due to the evolution of Android itself rather than an OTA fix.
For now the solution is to root and freeze. The Motofail exploit is so easy a child could do it, it takes less than 5 minutes, and the risk of messing up your phone is basically zero. Just because you're rooted doesn't mean you have to go crazy and start flashing tons of ROMs if you don't want to. Other than freezing those 40-odd apps, the only changes I've made are replacing the default font and the boot animation (although that may change if the ICS4Bionic project gets the camera and HDMI working). And now that the .902 FXZ file is available, we have an insurance policy in the event something does go wrong.
Maybe Google will ultimately fix the problem now that the Moto acquisition has gone through. They already fired the CEO, which I consider a step in the right direction. Personally I would rather they unlock the bootloader rather than addressing the bloatware issue, if I had to choose.
