As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight operating system so that it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the operating system was supposed to be contained in the T-Mobile G1, with only 256 MB of internal memory for Android and all applications, and since then the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest phone Samsungdove Android takes up a whopping 60GB of memory.
Yes the Galaxy S23 is slowly coming to the masses and as evidenced Mishaal Rahmansenior technical editor at Esper, in a survey on storage space, Samsung’s new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report that the phone uses approx 60 GB per the system partition from the start. If you have a 128GB phone, that’s almost half of the storage space for the Android OS and applications. It is four times the size of the normal system partition Pixel 7 Pro, which is 15GB. That’s the size of two Windows 11 installations, side by side. What could Samsung possibly put in it?!
We can make some hypotheses as to the reason for these dimensions. First, Samsung is notorious for having a crappy software division that produces low-quality code. The company tends to change everything in Android just for the sake of change, and it’s hard to think that these changes are very valid. Secondly, Samsung may want to give the impression of not having its own ecosystem Googleand to do that clone all apps Google supplied with your devices. Samsung is contractually obligated to include Google’s apps, so you get both version of Google than that of Samsung. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and so on. All of these apps are added to the system partition and are often not removable.
Unlike clean operating systems from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder through pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook buys a place in Samsung’s system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that are not granted to apps from the app store, allowing it to more effectively spy on users. They are usually found too Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin and who knows what else. If you buy a carrier phone, they also include another set of crapware, which is all of Verizon’s apps and all the space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount reported by users is 60 GBbut the offers of crapware they change between carriers and countries, so it will be different for everyone.
To continue reading other tech news, you can click Who!
It’s still 57gb after separating the apps. And this is only two days into using the S23 Ultra. I’d hate to see it after a year or even 6 months. pic.twitter.com/STbdfWQMez
— Alex Maxham (@alexmaxham) February 4, 2023
