The figures are in and it doesn’t make for pretty reading for Samsung. Sure, it’s the world’s most popular Android handset manufacturer, and yes the Galaxy S5 may have sold like hotcakes (just like every other phone in the series), but it turns out that when it comes to its software people are totally apathetic.
A recent data survey has revealed that all of that bloatware clogging up your Sammy handset barely gets touched. Hardly a shocking revelation if you happen to own one, as they’re…well, quite frankly they’re all rather terrible. The combined average total number of minutes spent across Samsung’s ‘key’ apps per month was just seven minutes. Time spent on Google’s three most popular apps, YouTube, Google Search and Google Play Store? 149 minutes.
It gets worse if you break the figures down further. Samsung Hub and Samsung App store received an average of 36 seconds of monthly use, compared to one hour and four minutes on its Google counterpart, the Play Store. As for Samsung ChatON, the Korean firm’s answer to messaging, the average user spent six seconds on it per month – in other words just long enough to open it by mistake and then quickly close it a couple of times. We don’t have the figures for how much time was spent in apps like WhatsApp or Google Hangouts, but it’s pretty safe to say that they probably get a bit more screen time.
As we said earlier this news won’t come as a surprise to any Samsung handset owner, but hopefully some of the higher-ups at Samsung might see it and decide to make a change. At the very least make some of this bloatware a little easier to remove – for your average user the process is oddly convoluted. Samsung might well have argued in the past that its software isn’t bloatware, but after seeing these figures it might have to change its attitude.