Clove Technology's Blog

Unless you have been disconnected from the internet over the last few weeks you can not have failed to have noticed that Samsung have taken a serious barrage of comments regarding the memory or lack of usable memory on the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Whilst they are not alone in the way they report memory, they are perhaps the biggest culprits for excessive use of the available storage.

I currently have an S4 and after installing all my apps (no games) i have around 600MB left.  Thankfully I stream my music, but I do not have any room for the music to be stored in offline mode .

Anyway, this has got me thinking…

Why when Samsung (and equivalents) announce cool features, why can we not download them as individual elements that can be installed at the users discretion?

This way if you wanted only 1 of the 30 features you will use less memory than installing all 30 that come currently pre-installed on the phone.

For example, I do not use S-Voice for anything other than the camera.  I have the other elements turned off, so can I remove these other elements?! It has been documented how you can speed up the home button by turning off S-Voice.  But for me I must have S-Voice on because I want to use it within the camera.

I do not use Smart Screen at all. It is doing no harm in the settings, but it must be eating up some memory.

There is a very strong argument that you should just opt for stock Android and then customise it with apps.  However this does not appeal to all and I have to say even as a more seasoned Android user, I like some of the Samsung features.

When we consider the wider mass market, your mum who has an Android phone wouldn’t even contemplate some features or adding them onto a stock Android handset. Samsung put them there for convenience thus there is a lot of appeal.

So why not have any of it installed as standard.  Upon initial start-up explain what can be downloaded and then allow users to download the bits they want. Hey presto, everyone gets what they want.

The obvious advantage here would be the ability to customise your phone more than you can now.  Yes, we can turn features on or off, but if you never use some features they sit in the background chewing up memory etc.

However, I think currently there are too many disadvantages from the eyes of the manufacturer.

It isn’t that simple just to add and remove bits of software as it all ties in and is fundamental to the phone in many cases.

There is the potential for even greater fragmentation of devices making it more difficult for support.

Certain great features would be overlooked by the mass market reducing the chance of success for the handset in global sales; but maybe we could reverse the idea and uninstall bits?!

My knowledge is software how it integrates to the hardware not to mention the possibility of the above is limited; but what I do know is many apps can be downloaded and installed onto phones to take a stock feel to a heavily customised and much more powerful solution like a Samsung Galaxy, so it must be nearly possible.

Samsung with their ever-growing size and power, not to mention cash reserves could be the ones to pioneer this approach and satisfy almost all users don’t you think?