AT&T has soiled the Nexus 6 by adding carrier branding and a custom boot screen

Attention, Android purists: Your worst nightmare has come true. Customers who purchase a Google Nexus 6 by Motorola from AT&T will receive a phone that not only has some ugly carrier branding on the back under the Nexus logo, but one that also has a brief AT&T boot animation at start up. The rest of the phone’s hardware and software seems to be pure Nexus, but still – this is pretty bad.

Motorola has long included a special partition where carriers could place boot animations on its devices, but no one thought that Motorola would include this on a Nexus device, as well. Luckily, it appears that AT&T is the only carrier doing this so far, as no similar reports have come in from T-Mobile, US Cellular, or Sprint customers. Verizon, unfortunately, has held off on selling the Nexus 6 directly right away, although it will activate units purchased from the Play Store – however, this revelation about the AT&T edition could mean that Verizon is using this delay to do something similar. Let’s hope not.

There are no indications that the AT&T version is SIM-locked, or loaded with other bloatware, but come on. This is so antithetical to what a Nexus device should be.

What do you think about AT&T’s branding all over the Nexus 6?

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