Samsung adds Amazon Music to new Galaxy devices

Samsung is preinstalling Amazon Music on Galaxy smartphones and tablets, adding another third-party app to devices that already ship with services such as Facebook, Instagram, OneDrive, LinkedIn, and Spotify.

To soften the change, Samsung is offering 3 months of Amazon Music Unlimited to new users. The trial applies only if they download or activate the service through the Galaxy Store within the next 12 months. After that period, the subscription will auto-renew at $13 per month unless it is canceled manually.

The move matters because of Samsung’s scale. Citing Engadget, the source notes that preinstalled apps on Galaxy devices can take up more than 1 GB of storage, and some cannot be fully removed. In some cases, users can only disable them, leaving parts of the software behind in the system.

That also sharpens the contrast with Apple, whose iPhone lineup does not ship with the same bundle of third-party apps by default. The broader dispute over Android “bloatware” has been running for more than ten years, with manufacturers benefiting from service partnerships while users absorb the downsides: lost storage, extra notifications, and cleanup work on a brand-new device.

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For Amazon, the partnership is a distribution play. According to MIDiA Research, Amazon Music ranks among the world’s largest music services, but trails Spotify and Apple Music in paying subscribers. Preinstallation on Galaxy devices gives Amazon direct access to one of Android’s biggest user bases. According to IDC, Samsung remained the world’s largest smartphone vendor in 2024, shipping more than 220 million devices.

How aggressive the integration is should become clearer after Samsung unveils its new Galaxy devices next week, when it will be possible to see whether Amazon Music can be removed completely or simply joins the list of apps users cannot fully delete.