Kellen
According to a report from Reuters, Samsung and Verizon booked a deal that will place four apps on all Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ devices in the US. The bloatware infestation will expand globally at some point too. In case you missed it, I just said “all,” not “Verizon Galaxy S9 phones.”
The report states that Verizon’s Oath, which is a content division made up of AOL and Yahoo, reached an agreement that adds Oath’s Newsroom app, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and Go90 (😂) to Galaxy S9 phones. And we’re talking all models, not just Verizon’s. The deal also opens up advertising space within the Oath apps and Samsung’s Galaxy App that the two companies will share revenue from.
At this point, we aren’t sure how Samsung plans to get these apps onto phones. I’m assuming they’ll be bundled into a software update at some point in the near future. At the very least, they will probably be pre-loaded on devices going forward. My guess is that you will be able to uninstall them, though that’s still kind of annoying.
I guess you gotta do what you gotta do when your flagship phones sales start to slip.
UPDATE: I may have missed this last night, but Oath confirmed the details in a news post. They mentioned the loading of the four apps we mentioned above, but acknowledged that Bixby Home will get integration with their brands too.
UPDATE 2: Reuters has now changed their initial report to say that this only affects Verizon Galaxy S9 phones. We’ve edited this post to reflect that.
// Reuters
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