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There should be a word for when OEMs ship intentionally broken and stripped down versions of the OS loaded with their own spyware or premium services to replace what was intentionally broken. So that I can use that term to essentially describe their white collar programmer crime of intentionally making shit worse as a middleware designer.

For example, AOSP, what Android is based on, has many useful, free features that device manufacturers intentionally remove before they ship. The hotspot settings tile that lets you make a wifi AP from your phone using your 4G/5G cellular modem as an internet gateway. Everyone loves that, but it gets removed and then users are tricked into installing or enabling paid spyware that replaces it, or denied the feature outright. I'm sure there are more examples. Removing functional features that serve everyone free of cost from upstream code and grafting some corporate middleware grift in its place if anything at all.

@thufie im sorry, but what do you mean about that hotspot feature? ive used samsung, moto, pixel and they all had the hotspot functionality built in, just had to pay for it from your mobile provider?

@tortoise so it was paywalled. Sometimes that happens too. That comes free with the OS, it shouldn't be paywalled by people who didn't even develop it.

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