Smartphone bloatware will now be user-removable in South Korea, starting in April

You see it all the time, you buy a handset with anywhere from 8 to 64GB of storage only to find that a sizable chunk is already occupied. While some of this is unavoidable due to the space taken up by the OS and other necessary software, often times there is a fair amount of pre-installed software that really isn’t needed. This situation is especially true if you happen to have a carrier branded device.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to remove all the ‘junk’ if you didn’t want to use any of it? Although this is certainly possible with rooting and other methods, South Korea is looking to make an important change that will help smartphone users in the country put the bloatware problem to bed once and for all.

Starting in April, new industry guidelines will go into effect that will require most OEM/carrier apps to be user-removable without need for root or other tricks. The law won’t limit how much junk can be stuffed into a device, but at least it gives users an easy way to deal with the problem.

Here’s to hoping that other countries follow South Korea’s lead on this matter. Those in the United States would certainly love the idea of being able to rid themselves of all the garbage bundled by carriers like Verizon, and we’re sure the same goes for the rest of the globe.