You told us: These are the first things you change on a new phone

Getting a new smartphone is a fun experience, as you unbox the device and play around with your shiny new toy. The setup process involves some work though, as you add a Wi-Fi connection, log in to your relevant accounts, install the desired apps, tweak sound profiles accordingly, add Bluetooth devices, and more.

Once the setup process is completed and you’ve tweaked the expected settings, we wanted to know what was the first thing you changed on your phone otherwise. We ran a poll earlier this week and here are the results.

What’s the first thing you change on a new phone?

Results

We posted this poll on June 13, accruing just over 3,600 votes until now. It turns out that removing or disabling bloatware was easily the most popular first change to make, accounting for 35.42% of the vote. We can totally get behind this choice, as many phones ship with annoying pre-installed apps that simply take up space on the home screen.

A distant second place was changing the wallpaper and/or theme, accounting for 17.73% of votes. Rounding out the top three was tweaking the display settings (e.g. resolution, colors, temperature, refresh rate, etc), as 12.03% of respondents chose this option.

Related: The first things to do with your new Android phone

Meanwhile, changing app settings (e.g. default apps and app notifications) and the launcher accounted for 11.98% and 11.27% of the vote respectively. Finally, the least popular picks on the list were “other” (4.62%), “system animations (3.86%), and “battery/charging settings (3.10%).

For what it’s worth, readers who voted for “other” and left a comment pointed to settings changes such as disabling vibration, switching the time to a 24-hour clock, changing to dark mode, and system tinkering (unlocking the bootloader, rooting, installing a custom ROM).

Comments

• O’ Christ: I’m disabling vibration feedback in every way possible.
• Ash: Switch time from 12 to 24
• Joel Myhre: I NEED to see the battery percentage otherwise I can’t function. I may be the only one, though.
• DBS: Immediately change to a proper Dark Theme (one that uses black which is how an actually good Dark Theme is done). Only then, when the phone is usable, can I proceed to change launchers, sounds, icons and uninstall all the Google spyware from it.
• Eric Koop: Change to dark mode, then all the other stuff I have to change isn’t such a pain
• and then what?: The bootloader status is what I change first. Yes, I still root my phone and it’s a pain to restore stuff if you unlock the bootloader at a later time.
• veesonic: I always change to Nova launcher and Google keyboard immediately. Other things I eventually get to lol.
• Mochammad Santaka: Change interface to gesture.
• André Moura: Disable keyboard haptic feedback
• fs10inator: ROM. Whenever possible, I unlock the bootloader, install custom recovery (such as TWRP), and install a custom ROM of my choice. This way, I get a much cleaner build of Android, with more room, and less bloat. Then, right after that, I switch launchers; in my case, I use Apex Laucher Classic, as it allows me to emulate the classic Launcher2 used in Google Nexus and GPE devices from 2011 (ICS) to 2014 (LP).
• Alessandro87: the entire OS aahahahah with a custom from. can t use stock rom on any device, i need root and a good rom.
• EENJ Tech: The first thing I do is change the screen stay on time from 30 seconds to ten minutes