Fed up with Google ads

So I just got a Galaxy S 23 FE phone to replace my recently lost Realme crapphone. And… frankly, it’s not much better. It came loaded with a LOT of bloat: Samsung apps (Galaxy Shop?), Microsoft apps (Copilot, Linkedin…), Netflix, and a bunch of crapware like “AR Doodle”, “AR Emoji” that are somehow running in the background. Of course, I cannot uninstall any of those without rooting my phone, if it’s even possible.

Going to the Play Store to download “Google Translate” that somehow wasn’t installed by default, the experience is that some random app appears first as an ad, using almost the exact icon:

The whole experience seems super cheap… I’ve always owned only Android phones, but I can totally understand the success of the iPhone. Google makes money on the ads so it can provide the OS for free, but the resulting experience between the ads and the manufacturers’ overlays is really, really poor.

Anyway, I am going to check if I can root the phone and remove all this crap. I still have to install Graphene on my old Pixel 4a as well.