Sony needs to work harder on bloatware

The Sony Xperia XA and Xperia XA Ultra suffer from a big bloatware problem. Both phones come with 16GB internal storage, which is pretty standard for a mid-range device. Great, you might think, that’s plenty of enough storage for me. After all, last year Sony was still peddling mid-rangers with 8GB.

However, for some reason, Sony has locked these phones much harder compared to other Xperia models. You cannot remove any apps that the phone ships with. At all. Sony has generally got better with bloatware with its flagship devices more recently, allowing you to delete apps such as Facebook for example. This is not the case for the Xperia XA or XA Ultra.



The apps that arrive when you buy the handset cannot be deleted. Instead, Sony offers you the option to disable the apps and remove any data associated with them. This really irks as we only had 8.43GB of free storage from 16GB when powering on our Xperia XA Ultra for the first time. Once all of the system apps had updated via the Google Play Store, we were left with only 5.57GB (gulp!)

So just to be clear – we have a phone marketed as having 16GB internal storage, yet without installing any new apps ourselves, it will only leave you with under 6GB to download your own apps. Sony really needs to refine its software, because the bloat within the firmware and installed apps is simply ridiculous.

What is even more frustrating is that despite Sony knowing how much room its software takes, it sticks a middle finger up to the customer by saying you are not allowed to delete any of the apps. We’re not sure the reason for turning apps like Amazon Shopping, Facebook, AVG Protection, Kobo into system app, but they should never be, in any smartphone.

After spending their hard earnt money, customers should have the choice on what is installed on their handset. Maybe that is being idealistic, and we know money talks, but when there are these type of decisions that affect the consumer experience, Sony should be listening harder. We really hope Sony has an update planned that resolves this situation quickly.

The Xperia XA Ultra has just under 8.5GB of free space on first boot…

… however, this falls to 5.6GB of free space once all of the system apps have been updated

No problem, it looks like I can delete plenty of apps through the app tray…

… nope! Apps can only be disabled rather than removed entirely