Nothing Phones to get advertising and bloatware
Along with the first beta version of Nothing OS 4.0, the company has announced two rather controversial changes, starting with a feature called "Lock Glimpse". This replaces the user-selected wallpaper on the lock screen with advertising, displaying an image and a line of text, which can be opened with a swipe to reveal a promotional link.
Every time the smartphone is woken up from standby mode, a new advertisement appears. Nothing stresses that this feature is disabled by default on smartphones such as the Nothing Phone (3a) and so is optional. It remains to be seen whether this will also be the case for future smartphones, especially cheaper devices such as the Nothing Phone (3a) Lite. It is conceivable that Nothing will charge a fee to disable the ads, similar to what we know from the Amazon Kindle.
An equally controversial is the decision to ship future smartphones with a selection of third-party apps pre-installed, i.e., bloatware. Nothing states that this is intended to create an additional revenue stream and improve the profit margins of Nothing Phones. Flagship smartphones will continue to be shipped without bloatware.
According to Nothing, these are "useful" apps that many users would download anyway, such as Instagram. These apps should also be relatively easy to remove. Customers are expressing their annoyance on the Nothing Community Forum, not least because Nothing founder Carl Pei has regularly promised in the past that Nothing OS would remain free of bloatware.
Source(s)
