Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Have you ever gotten a nice, shiny new computer, brought it home, set it all up and then found out that the manufacturer felt the need to install like five different antivirus software trials (and an AOL installer, for some reason) before it even left the factory? Now you have to uninstall all of them, otherwise they bog down your system resources and bug you to buy the full version a month later.

Now imagine it was set up so that you can't get rid of the bullshit, and it took up a good chunk of your hard drive space. That's the situation with smartphones.

Getty

It also comes packaged with an odd sense of self-satisfaction, but that's usually deflated moments later.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The first time you pull your new phone out of the box and turn it on, you might find some app you don't give a shit about. And then another. In some cases, as much as 10 percent of your phone's storage can be taken up by crap -- and by crap, we mean apps that will expire after a demo period and won't let you use them further unless you pay for the full version.

OK, you say, that's the same as what we dealt with on our PCs. But the difference is that in many cases, this stuff can't be uninstalled. It will eat up a big chunk of the phone's resources -- forever. Congratulations, you've got bloatware. It can be anything from a copy of the movie Avatar to the game The Sims 3, or any number of for-pay services you will never, ever use.