I just sent this to Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon Wireless. His email address is lowell.mcadam@verizonwireless.com. I urge people to send him friendly and well-worded emails about why we don't like bloatware.
Edit1:
His response:
Good afternoon Mr. McAdam,
I have been a Verizon Wireless customer since I got my first cellphone at the ripe age of 16. When I was 20, I finally got my own plan with Verizon Wireless and have been an extremely happy customer for the past two years. I just purchased the new Droid X and really looked forward to digging in to the Android Operating System and enjoying a nice open source phone. Much to my chagrin, the phone is full of a disgusting amount of bloat. I don't need BlockBuster, CityID, Amazon MP3, Kindle, Backup and Restore, Skype, or anything else from you! I can install my own apps that I want on MY phone, thank you.
At first, I was not particularly bothered by the bloat applications. I kept remembering that the community would come up with a way to root the phone and allow me to uninstall the applications. (By the way, rooting now became fair-use under the DMCA). Now though, I am rather upset. I learned that if you delete those applications, you can no longer perform OTA updates. That is kind of ridiculous! I just don't understand why I need to have these on my phone in order to update the operating system. The simple fact that I need to root my phone to uninstall these applications is a little over the top as well. If you gave us the option to uninstall things from our phone, I think we would be fine.
What is the point of the bloat anyway? Haven't you ever been annoyed by having extra programs installed on your computer that you don't want? At least you can uninstall those...
I am not expecting that you fix this immediately. But I am hoping that something can be done to fix this. Whether we are granted the right to remove the applications without root or we are allowed to do OTA updates with the applications uninstalled, I truly don't care. I just want to have the applications gone and the ability to update my phone.
Thank you very much for your time.
PS. I am posting this on the Android Central Forums (here: ) and CCing the staff there, along with The Consumerist.
Regards,
Geran Smith
Edit1:
His response:
from McAdam, Lowell <Lowell.McAdam@verizonwireless.com>
to Geran Smith <gsmith2001@gmail.com>
date Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 2:58 PM
subject RE: Droid X Bloatware
Mr. Smith
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I have asked the device team to understand this and work with Google on a good solution.
Lowell
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