Rumor: With The Galaxy S6, Is Samsung About To Ditch One Of The Most Annoying Things About Galaxy Phones?

Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S6 promises to signal a shift for the South Korean tech giant, with Samsung reportedly moving on to much higher build quality for the S6. There might be another change in the works, though, as Samsung is supposedly set to ditch one of the most annoying things about its Galaxy devices with the debut of the Galaxy S6.

Samsung’s Galaxy line of Android devices are, bar none, the best overall selling handsets in the world, but one continuous complaint from a number of users has been the software that Samsung packages with its Galaxy devices. Samsung’s TouchWiz software has been derided as bloated, slow, and unnecessary, but the tech giant has continued to stick with its Android “skin” despite the complaints of tech observers and users the world round.

That might be changing, though, if new reports out of Samsung fan site SamMobile are to be believed. SamMobile claims that Samsung will roll out the Galaxy S6 with “near-Nexus levels” of Android optimization. By “near-Nexus,” the report refers to the Nexus line of devices that Google releases every year. Those devices come with “pure Android,” or Google’s Android operating system without any manufacturer or carrier bloatware built in.

Just what will that mean for the Galaxy S6? The degree to which Samsung will strip down the operating system on the Galaxy S6 is unclear, but it may be the case that many of the apps that Samsung pre-installs on Galaxy devices will instead be moved to the Google Play Store, meaning that users will have much more space on a new device.

Another question is whether Samsung will do away with some of the superfluous features that it builds on top of Android for Galaxy devices. Tech observers have complained for years that many of Samsung’s most touted features – for instance, having a Galaxy phone watch a user’s eyes in order to pause a video if they look away – don’t work the way they are advertised, if at all.

If Samsung were to do away with these features, it would no doubt make Android slimmer and more optimized on the Galaxy S6 and future Galaxy devices.

Tech observers expect that Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S6 a bit later this year, likely at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While a number of leaks have hinted at just what might be in store for the Galaxy S6 – including a unibody metal build and some beefed up specs – Samsung has been surprisingly quiet on that front, revealing little about what we can expect when the S6 takes the stage for the first time.