It's no big secret that Samsung packs a lot of bloatware onto its devices, and the company is at it again with the Galaxy S7: it occupies 8 GB of internal space out of the box.
The term bloatware is used to describe software and apps that the device manufacturer or some carrier preinstalls on said hardware. All of that bloatware takes up more or less of the advertised internal storage of the device, so in reality you don't really get as much storage as you think.
With the new Samsung Galaxy S7, bloatware continues to feel right at home, despite serious woes surrounding bloatware on previous Galaxy S generations. For the 32 GB version of the new flagship smartphone, Samsung's preinstalled software takes up as much as a quarter – a whopping 8 GB. That space houses various system apps, the company's TouchWiz UX and others such.
The news comes hot on the heels of the whole Galaxy S7 "Adoptable Storage" controversy, as Samsung said it would not support this popular Android Marshmallow feature.
As it turns out, however, some good news is still on the horizon. While the Galaxy S7 takes up a huge amount of internal space from the get go and it allegedly does away with Adoptable Storage, it seems that it does allow users to move apps to SD after all.
Droid-Life reports it was able to move Galaxy S7 apps to an SD card, as long as they're not system apps. Any other application from Google Play is good to go, which is definitely a noteworthy consolation considering the bloatware and the fact that the previous Galaxy S6 did not even have expandable storage.
"If I ripped the SD card out, it took away all of those apps and said they were tied to the SD card," notes Droid-Life.
In conclusion, Samsung takes up a hefty amount of device storage space for its own stuff, and not all customers may be aware of that when they make their purchase. It fills up 8 GB of storage with bloatware, but allows you to install more apps on an SD card. It may not be the fairest trade, but it would be far worse without the move to SD option.
Lastly, it's worth pointing out that the same applies to the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge model as well, not just the standard Galaxy S7.
