Marketing should always be OPT-IN by default, but these extra steps to opt out is truly asshole design.
Oh, and on the opt-out confirmation screen, you get two options: Yes or No. The button colour for “yes” is white, and the “no” button matches the “save” button on the previous screen, so it’s easy to accidentally cancel the opt-out. Double-asshole design!
It’s like when you try to stop Android autodeleting app data for all my apps when I don’t use them in 3 months (I have plenty of storage, and I don’t want this stuff gone if I lose internet). You have to click on Settings > Apps > All apps, and for each app, click on it, scroll down, toggle the ‘delete all app data after 3 months of inactivity’ button, go back, repeat for all ~150 apps, remember to do this whenever I install/reinstall an app, and sometimes the settings just seems to randomly revert and I find my app data has been deleted, and then I need to manually check each app again, because Google didn’t consider that people might want to turn this ‘feature’ of for every app at once, or at least have a list of toggles, rather than having to go into the app settings for each app.
That’s awful! Is it stock android? I’m not seeing the option on my Samsung phone, but I’m also on Android 12 😮💨
Maybe Samsung removed it in favor of their own app pauser.
This is what I see on a normal Pixel phone
Personally I don’t have much issue with it, as I usually uninstall apps that my phone points out are going unused. In reality, I want zero apps and to just use the mobile web for everything but that’s not possible due to dark patterns.
Cough Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Reddit cough cough
I’m honestly not sure what they are talking about, I’m on Android 14 on my s23 and that isn’t a feature, nor has it ever been on any android phone I’ve ever had or seen. There is an option to remove permissions for apps that have not been used, but not to delete all storage for an app after an amount of time.
Samsung. Yep. That’s your problem there.
No? It’s literally not a thing on any android. I just pretty extensively looked for any evidence of this online and I can only see people misunderstanding the feature of removing permissions for unused apps. One of the permissions apps are granted is storage, and that permission can get revoked if that feature is turned on. This does not delete stored data (it does not remove data the app has already written) but removes the apps ability to read or write to storage further, and can cause any temporary storage like cache to get erased. This will cause your accounts to get signed out and could potentially lead to data loss, but not because the operating system is actively and purposefully erasing data.
I was just talking about Samsung phones being a problem in general. Fuck Samsung.
Yeah, Motorola Android is basically stock, right?
Interesting. I’ve only ever owned a lower end Motorola android phone, and it only had minimal tweaks to vanilla android. But I’ve never heard of this feature on other phones, so I wonder if it’s a Motorola feature/tweak and not and Android one.
It wouldn’t make it any better, since that sounds like a terrible feature to have automatically enabled!
It’s an Android feature, added in 13.