Well, my HTC Incredible is getting on toward 3 years old, and, while it seems like time to get a 4G phone with a bigger (more geezer-friendly) screen, the old phone is still in fine condition, not even urgently needing a new battery.
Except: the software's been increasingly unstable the past year or so, and for the last couple of weeks I've been getting a persistent "Phone storage space is getting low" alert.
Apparently the updates to the Verizon-installed, non-removable apps that I never use are piling up, leaving basically no space. Or something; it's not clear whether the complaint is about internal flash or RAM.
There certainly does appear to be a RAM shortage, which there never was before. Thing is: the RAM is being eaten by some combination of system services and mandatory crapware.
Of particular annoyance (though it doesn't appear to be taking up all that much RAM) is the Slacker Radio app... which, not only can I not remove it, I can't even kill the running process. Or, rather, if I kill the process it promptly respawns.
And I have a strong suspicion that there are other immortal processes that don't even show up on the task manager. (In fact, I'm certain a lot of processes, immortal or otherwise, aren't visible; it is, after all, a running Linux system.)
So, two points.
First, the accumulation of vendor-pushed crapware and crapware patches means that a new phone becomes mandatory rather than optional (unless of course I root the phone I've got, but it's meant to be a communication device, not a hacker toy).
Second, just how confident is anyone that none of these unkillable processes are spyware? For all I know, one of the processes I didn't ask for and can't get rid of is gathering location data and ambient sounds, and transmitting bundles of where-I've-been and what's-been-said-in-my-presence back to Verizon and thence the NSA... and maybe to commercial competitors of my clients.
Maybe I should root the thing?
Update: apparently the warning was in regard to "application data storage", whereof a huge amount was being consumed by Google Currents, Facebook, and Firefox. Of those three, I actually use Firefox once in a while. By clearing the application data for those three apps, I got rid of the warning. Sometime when things are slower, I'll go through and see what else needs its bloated app data zapped. And, when cash is less tight, I'll look at shiny new phones. Like maybe an unbranded Nexus... not available for Verizon's LTE network, so I'd have to switch carriers, which would mean doing another round of homework: when I switched to Verizon many years ago, it was because the other carriers' coverage around the South Bay was seriously deficient, and perhaps that's changed by now.
Comments