Verizon’s bloatware goes global: coming soon to the Galaxy S9

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Update 3:35 PM: This post has been updated to reflect Oath’s official announcement of this partnership, but that it only applies to content served to Bixby Home. Oath’s announcement says this will affect Galaxy S9 devices in the U.S. first, then later globally.

Update 7:00 PM: Reuters has updated their post to say that the partnership will only affect Samsung Galaxy S9 devices in the U.S., though there’s no mention of Bixby Home in their report.

Bloatware is a very subjective term within the smartphone industry. Everyone has their own opinion when it comes to what they feel is needed or not. Many will consider applications from Google to be bloatware because they don’t use them. Others are happy to have carrier apps on their device because they actually use them to do things such as manage their account and consume content. Verizon Communications Inc’s Oath Inc subsidiary has officially partnered with Samsung to install four of its applications on millions of devices within the United States and eventually around the world.

Verizon Wireless has been going around and acquiring various online entities these last few years. Back in 2015, they moved to own AOL and then in 2016 they purchased the assets to Yahoo. It was reported that the company was planning on merging AOL and Yahoo to form a new company called Oath, but that wasn’t entirely true. Instead, Verizon Wireless decided to create Oath and use it to house 20 Verizon-owned media brands, including Yahoo’s sites, AOL (including TechCrunch and Engadget), and Huffington Post.

To help get these media brands some extra attention, a new partnership between Verizon Wireless and Samsung gives the South Korean conglomerate installing Oath’s Newsroom app, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and Go90 mobile video applications on all of their Samsung Galaxy S9 and Samsung Galaxy S9+ devices in a future update. It seems like a major reason behind this deal is the projected increase of content consumption on smartphones, which is expected to increase to 196.4 million users by the year 2020.

With the number of people watching content on televisions expected to continue declining (dropping down to 295.9 million during this same time period), Verizon is hoping they are able to bring in some of these new users onto their platform during this transition.