I'm not familiar with the gestures thing, that...may have been something on my device but if it was it was one of the modules I removed.
I'm referring to all the applications that come preinstalled, and the modules that run in the background like the emergency alerts stuff, as well as numerous services that each application has that's useful to 3 people and no one else, but want to run anyway. Even on the MotoG, I disabled/deleted numerous applications including a number of Motorola one-time things that shouldn't but liked to run all the time anyway, a bunch of google things that were useless, a number of helpful "services" that didn't need to be there, and lots and lots of programs that were poor copies of free or cheap commercial equivalents.
Even within programs there were lots of services that wanted to run, connectivity and cloud and other "helpful" things that just sat there and ate battery time while being not-useful. Android is weird, you can fine-grain prevent services from running (with root and an application) and it doesn't care. Typically, I have no more than 5-6 foreground things running, unlike the forever list I see on other phones.
I agree that the pre-installed stuff is unnecessary when it can be downloaded anyway when needed.
However, I don't like the reduction of hardware features and non-downloadable functionality (like done with Galaxy S6, where many menu options were removed).
I also despise those which basically beg users to root their devices.
Their newest witch craft is scoped storage. I understand its aim to improve privacy,
- It is odd how they use the privacy argument just when it comes to restrict users.
- It massively breaks compatibility with established software if there is no ability to opt out for user-selected apps. Same with the 2014 MicroSD card scandal, when they revoked writing access to it entirely for user-installed apps.
That SD restriction is one of the reasons I had to root my device. Even the workarounds didn't very well.
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