Today I looked at my phone (a Motorola Moto G85), and saw six new application icons on my app drawer. I recognized those icons, they were the same applications it installed during the first setup I went through when I first got this phone: various games which I can only assume are ad-ridden and have some sort of deal with Motorola/Lenovo to get them installed in as many phones as they can.

Fortunately, Android provides the user with the ability to see what installed an application in their device, and in this case, they were all installed by an application by the name of "Moto App Manager".

If you search for that name you'll get lots of results from places like Reddit, some blogs or review sites, and even Lenovo's community forums, about what the app does: installing "helpful suggested apps".

For a similar story related to the point I'm about to make, this exact same phone runs out of memory every week or so for no reason, and until I restart it, it just... doesn't work correctly. Apps crash for no reason, anything that uses the fingerprint reader refuses to work, crashing when the dialog is normally shown, the tap-to-pay functionality doesn't work, nothing works until I hit restart and wait five whole fucking minutes or more for the phone to boot up.

I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get "solutions" to problems that shouldn't have even been problems to begin with.

For example, I posted about this on Mastodon as a rant and one of the responses I got went along the lines of "oh, you can disable the app for good by getting into USB debugging mode and sending commands to the phone to freeze the application.", and it's ridiculous that I (or anyone else for that matter) should be expected to jump through hoops of that kind just to make my phone just slightly more usable.

If I told any of my family members that they have to restart their phone every once in a while otherwise it starts acting up, or that I need to connect their phone to my computer and send it commands to stop it from installing apps they never asked for, they'd start wondering whether the phone is malfunctioning or something like that.

And that's the problem. Why do I, or anyone who is slightly tech-savvy, have to cope with tricks and hoops and general fuckery with everything we are forced to use to make it usable? Why do the rest have to either just "get used to it" or have to ask for help to make their devices more pleasant to use?

"Just go to this hidden section in the settings and disable this switch, but only after 4 dialog boxes asking you if you really want to!"--- "You need to disable this application by sending commands from your computer so it won't install shit bloatware that you'll never need!"

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

We're basically letting abusive practices in technology hold us hostage.

Thanks to my friend Spencer who helped me with proofreading for this post! :)