Bloatware on the Galaxy S23 series inflates Android 13 to 60GB

If you ordered one of the Samsung Galaxy S23 models, you may find yourself running out of storage space sooner than you’d like. Reports suggest Samsung’s version of Android 13 is four times bigger than the stock version of Android on the Pixel 7.

Earlier this month, Samsung had its big launch party for the Galaxy S23 series. As the handsets begin to find their way into the hands of the public, users are discovering something surprising about the operating system. According to Ars Technica, multiple users are reporting that Samsung’s version of Android on the Galaxy S23 is weighing in at around 60GB.

For context, Android 13 on the Pixel 7 series only uses about 15GB of storage. As Ars Technica points out, 60GB is twice the size of Windows 11 and would take up almost half of the storage on a 128GB phone.

So what’s the deal? What is causing Samsung’s OS to inflate so drastically? The answer appears to be bloatware.

As you would expect, Android comes with a number of Google apps. To give the appearance of having its own ecosystem, Samsung clones these apps for its devices. So you get two collections of similar apps because Samsung is contractually obligated to include the Google apps, according to Ars Technica.

In addition, Samsung tends to sell space on its devices. This means companies like Facebook can buy a spot on your phone and it gets added to Samsung’s system partition. What’s worse is many of these apps may not allow you to uninstall them.

Although 60GB sounds bad, it could have been a lot worse if Samsung stored two copies of the OS like other phones do. Samsung is the only major manufacturer that doesn’t.

But if you ever do run out of space, at least there are some cloud storage options S23 owners can rely on.