Samsung's Android build is 4x bigger than Google's—twice the size of Windows 11.

We can take a few guesses as to why things are so big. First, Samsung is notorious for having a shoddy software division that pumps out low-quality code. The company tends to change everything in Android just for change’s sake, and it’s hard to imagine those changes are very good.

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Unlike the clean OSes you’d get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung’s system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren’t granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users.

Urgh, it’s so frustrating that Samsung is the leading Android manufacturer, the market is rewarding greed and incompetence

  • erpichtEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible.

    Emphasis mine. Now, I know graphics improvements and support for various versions of Android take up a lot of the space used, but gee willikers! It’s amazing to think it began with storage requirements far under a single gigabyte.