Hey Samsung, please spare us the AI bloatware armageddon

AI is taking an increasingly outsized role in Samsung's mobile strategy. We saw what the future held when the company spent the vast majority of the time during the Galaxy S24's Unpacked event last year talking about Galaxy AI. We saw a repeat of that in January at the Galaxy S25 launch event.

Google is highly involved in the process. Its AI technology is powering various features on Galaxy devices. Its Gemini AI has all but replaced Bixby as the preferred conversational assistant and Google even made some Gemini Advanced features exclusive to the Galaxy S25 series for a limited time. Such is Google's influence on Galaxy AI that may need to start charging for some Galaxy AI features as early as the end of this year.

It's unlikely that most Galaxy S25 owners who get the best Galaxy AI experience on their device have fully capitalized on all features or even understood what they're supposed to do. Modern devices come with so many features and functions that the average user can never truly take advantage of.

While Samsung relentlessly and annoyingly pursues refinement over shock and awe when it comes to hardware upgrades, it's coming close to adopting a throw everything against the wall and see what sticks attitude to AI on its mobile devices.

Gemini may soon be accompanied by other AI apps on Samsung Galaxy devices. OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, has reportedly been in talks with Samsung to bring AI features to its devices, in a manner similar to what OpenAI has done for Apple Intelligence.

Samsung is also reportedly in talks with Perplexity, a conversational search assistant with aspirations of taking on Google, to bring AI experiences to Galaxy phones and tablets. A top Google executive has already confirmed that Samsung is having discussions with multiple AI companies to bring experiences that will rival Gemini on its products.

If Samsung hangs a bright neon OPEN sign for its platform, I'd bet Microsoft would come knocking too. Galaxy devices already come with pre-installed Microsoft apps, including M365 Copilot, the AI integrated rebrand of Office for mobile. All of this will be on top of what Samsung builds independently with Galaxy AI.

If you used a Samsung phone in the early to mid-2010s, you'd remember that they had an insane amount of bloatware. There used to be a Samsung alternative to almost every Google native app, various apps from its partners, and users in the US also had to contend with unwanted apps from their mobile carriers.

Those apps didn't just harmlessly take up space on the device. Users had to live with unwanted notifications, badges, and even ads. They'd all together eat up gigabytes of storage on the device and make for a very poor user experience. This behavior even got Samsung sued in China before the company ultimately allowed users there to uninstall the useless apps.

Samsung only committed to removing “cumbersome bloatware” on its devices with the Galaxy S6 in 2015. While it's not as bad as it used to be, even devices as recent as the Galaxy S23 series lost a major chunk of their internal storage to bloatware. At least older phones had expandable storage, the newer devices don't even have microSD card slots.

I fear we may be headed for an AI bloatware armageddon on Samsung devices. AI companies look at the massive global reach of Samsung's user base with what can probably be described as uncontrollable lust. They can instantly reach hundreds of millions of users across the globe who'll provide their data to use these services, and data is the new oil in this AI age.

Samsung doesn't need to chase after them to put their AI services on Galaxy devices. They'll come to Samsung and likely pay for the privilege. Google's already paying Samsung an “enormous sum” of money every single month just to have the Gemini app installed on its phones. Show me a company that doesn't like free money and I'll show you chickens that can fly.

Just like more camera or note taking apps didn't mean better user experiences back in the day, more AI apps won't necessarily deliver better experiences. There's bound to be some overlap between them so each individual AI app would appear to be only a marginal enhancement rather than a game-changer.

It may actually be counterproductive, causing analysis paralysis and cognitive overload for users, because it then becomes their job to figure out why this AI app is better than the other one. AI would become fragmented on Galaxy devices and instead of a unified, intuitive interface, they'd be left wondering which AI to ask for help with what exactly and when.

We've seen this fatigue before smart voice assistants. You have both Bixby and Google Assistant pre-installed on Samsung devices. If you felt extra adventurous, you could also install Amazon's Alexa from the Play Store. Microsoft's Cortana was also in the mix until 2021.

When everything has an AI label slapped on it, the novelty will wear off rather quickly, and features that are actually useful will get lost in the noise. Users wouldn't want AI everywhere, they'd want AI where it truly helps them save time or do things not possible before on a device.

If Samsung goes down this route, it has all the potential of becoming more about expanding partnerships than creating a refined cross-device seamless AI layer. When AI becomes a checklist rather than a compass, we stop building phones for people and start building platforms for hype.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather not pay top dollar for a flagship Galaxy phone that's basically an all access pass to an AI app zoo.