Pre-Installed Android Apps

Whitson Gordon for Lifehacker, “How to Speed Up Your Old or Sluggish Android Device”:

If something is constantly running in the background, it may be causing some of the performance hits on your device. Unless it’s something you can’t live without (and are thus willing to live with any slowness it might cause), uninstall it and find an alternative.

Note that some of the worst offenders in this category are apps that come pre-installed on your phone. Unfortunately, you need to be rooted to uninstall these, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.

Andy Rubin, two days ago at D: Dive Into Mobile:

Walt: I notice more and more they are taking on the personality of the carrier, not Google, not the handset maker. There are lots of what I would call craplets. Verizon, for example, swapped out Google for Bing. Is there a danger it is being taken over?

Rubin: That’s the nature of open. That’s actually a feature of Android.

★ Wednesday, 8 December 2010