5 ms·

Thanks to XDA devs I'm able to run my 10ish year old tab (galaxy n8000) with the very latest Android and almost all apps. Yes some apps are a bit sluggish but

Thanks to XDA devs I'm able to run my 10ish year old tab (galaxy n8000) with the very latest Android and almost all apps. Yes some apps are a bit sluggish but most useful apps are good as running on any latest hardware. This is definitely one advantage of owning an Android device over other companies that deliberately slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware.

CydeWeys 6y ago
I'm impressed that you're still managing to use 10 year old mobile hardware, but were it me, I'd spend at least $100 on some much more recent used hardware for the substantial performance boost.
microcolonel 6y ago
> Android device over other companies that deliberately slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware. I think there is a good faith way to interpret Apple's aging battery policy, of course, it would be a lot easier to interpret it that way if they handled repairs in a way that wasn't hostile to users. BTW if you like your tablet a lot, that's cool; if you're just holding on to it because you don't want to get a new one, and you live in a big city, there's a good chance somebody is literally throwing away higher spec tablets within a couple km of you.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  I think Apple was shady with the silent slowdown for old batteries, but these days they will replace an old iPhone battery for $50, which seems reasonable to me.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    I think it was poorly handled but I’m not sure I’d call it shady. I used to have an iPhone 5 that would shut off when I stepped outside in the winter because the battery was shot. Knowing the battery was the reason would have been nice.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      The reason apple lost a lawsuit is that they didn't tell people they had a bad battery. They quietly slowed the battery and then when people asked for help they said it was a bad phone that needed replacement. words in italics were the shady parts.
      - azinman2 6y ago
        I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about malice intent versus trying to keep phones running.
        oblio 6y ago
        They lost a lawsuit (settled for half a billion, same thing as losing). At what point do we agree it was malice?
        azinman2 6y ago
        According to the Reuters article: “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.” [1] It’s entirely possible the lack of clarity of what was happening violated consumer protection laws (I’m guessing, I don’t know what specifically the lawsuit was based on) without malice intended. The Apple way is to try and have design be silent and in the background. In this case it was a way to solve degrading batteries that would cause a phone to reboot, so slowing down to compensate is a slick way of preventing random reboots without involving the user. Since it doesn’t seem to be the case that this happened without battery degradation, I don’t think you can point to evidence that this was done to cause new phone sales. Am I mistaken? [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/apple-to-pay-up-to-500-million-to-settle-u-s-lawsuit-over-slow-iphones-idUSKBN20P2E7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/...
        oblio 6y ago
        > “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.” That's literally the text used by everyone that settles. Apple employs enough lawyers to populate a small country. Nobody with that kind of legal firepower gives up a lawsuit by settling for a million of $300 million and up to $500 million for no good reason. They settled for the same reasons everyone settles: 1. Because they can afford to pay. 2. Because they know they're going to lose (and they would probably have to pay more and may even be punished in some other ways, on top of that). It's obvious I can't prove this myself, but they didn't disclose it and only did so when their hand was forced by third parties investigating and after this settlement. I mean, what would they have to do to be assumed malicious, in this case? If basically losing a class action lawsuit is not enough, what is? Tim Cook coming up on stage and admitting it? It's not even their first example of thinly veiled for-profit malicious moves, such as the removal of the headphone jack (presented at the time as due to space reasons, reason immediately debunked by many people disassembling phones).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
shajznnckfke 6y ago
Having used Android and iOS devices, old and new, on average my experience is that the iOS devices perform well for years longer. Although installing custom versions on XDA can sometimes get more life out of abandoned hardware (I’m not sure if the jailbreak scene for iOS is similar, because I never felt the stock OS was missing anything).
- izacus 6y ago
  > Having used Android and iOS devices, old and new, on average my experience is that the iOS devices perform well for years longer. The main reason for this is hardware though - there's always plenty of conspiracy theories around that, but the biggest issues we've seen across Android ecosystem are due to flash. Cheap eMMC flash with lowend controllers degrades pretty quickly (within 3-4 years) and you suddenly start seeing like 20-3000ms read times of a single settings file. Since a lot of apps just read those files on UI thread, this results in a lot of stuttering because developers expect < 16ms response times for those reads. Writes get even worse - it's not rare to see 500ms+ times for writes to configuration files of < 1KB in size, especially if there are multiple parallel writes queued (common in browsers when they cache webpages for example). Apple and higher end Android devices tend to use better SSD quality flash which tends to last years longer than eMMC one and thus the devices don't slow down that much.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    This is very interesting and the first time I’ve heard anyone discuss this. Do you have data / benchmarks you could point to? It would certainly address a lot of “planned obsolescence” criticisms by making it more plain the cause of the slowdown.
    - izacus 6y ago
      Unfortunately this mostly comes from my professional projects as Android developer and large-scale profiling data. It was confirmed by many devices I got to debug and "fix" when slowed down, but that's more anectodal. I don't really have links to actual research on phones though - although eMMC degradation is a pretty researched topic itself.
reaperducer 6y ago
slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware. According to what I read here on HN, iOS devices have a longer usable lifespan than Android devices, and are officially supported much longer. Is that no longer the case?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Parent is talking about running an unsupported OS on their Android device.
- extremeMath 6y ago
  It's impossible to know since Apple users are extremely subjective. It's better to just avoid them IMO. It's well documented the anti-consumer policies done by Apple. It's easy to see them poor money into massive advertising campaigns. Consider the highly likely situation where someone bought a multi hundred dollar device, is disappointed, and need to justify it to themselves.
lostlogin 6y ago
There is an iPad 2 on the bench here that is used most days. It’s just fine. Whatever Apple has done to it seems to have helped it, particularly it’s battery life which is ok, but worse than when new.
alisonkisk 6y ago
Those "slowed down" iOS devices are nowhere near as slow as your "sluggish" Android apps.
- vetinari 6y ago
  In my chart, the record holder is iPhone 3G after iOS 4 update. I don't remember any Android device being so slow.
- extremeMath 6y ago
  I wonder if you are used to animations hiding the loading time for you. I've never noticed a slow android outside 100$ crap, but I did notice how slow the iphone animations are
zozbot234 6y ago
Looks like the pmOS folks are working on mainline support for this device, so it might be able to run non-Android OS's in the future, as well. That's quite nice. Though I'm not sure how the latest mobile stack (phosh, and the like) would run on a 2GB RAM device. (I do know that 2GB is a bit tight for the usual gnome-shell environment, so there's that.)
GeekyBear 6y ago
If Apple wanted to use software updates to force people to upgrade their hardware, the original iPhone SE wouldn't be starting it's sixth year of OS and security updates. Also, it's more problematic to me that when faced with customers reporting the same "this phone randomly dies while showing that it has a good charge" issue on the Nexus 6p, Google never fixed the issue. >If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger. https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-randomly-dying-its-not-just-you-0175625/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random... Eventually they just marked the issue as won't fix. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shutdown-fixed/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...
jccalhoun 6y ago
That really depends on the hardware. If there isn't someone willing to maintain the project then your device won't get community updates. My last phone stopped getting manufacturer updates and progress on community made roms was slow so I went with an pixel 4a.

CydeWeys 6y ago

I'm impressed that you're still managing to use 10 year old mobile hardware, but were it me, I'd spend at least $100 on some much more recent used hardware for the substantial performance boost.

microcolonel 6y ago

> Android device over other companies that deliberately slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware. I think there is a good faith way to interpret Apple's aging battery policy, of course, it would be a lot easier to interpret it that way if they handled repairs in a way that wasn't hostile to users. BTW if you like your tablet a lot, that's cool; if you're just holding on to it because you don't want to get a new one, and you live in a big city, there's a good chance somebody is literally throwing away higher spec tablets within a couple km of you.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
I think Apple was shady with the silent slowdown for old batteries, but these days they will replace an old iPhone battery for $50, which seems reasonable to me.
- selectodude 6y ago
  I think it was poorly handled but I’m not sure I’d call it shady. I used to have an iPhone 5 that would shut off when I stepped outside in the winter because the battery was shot. Knowing the battery was the reason would have been nice.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    The reason apple lost a lawsuit is that they didn't tell people they had a bad battery. They quietly slowed the battery and then when people asked for help they said it was a bad phone that needed replacement. words in italics were the shady parts.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about malice intent versus trying to keep phones running.
      - oblio 6y ago
        They lost a lawsuit (settled for half a billion, same thing as losing). At what point do we agree it was malice?
        azinman2 6y ago
        According to the Reuters article: “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.” [1] It’s entirely possible the lack of clarity of what was happening violated consumer protection laws (I’m guessing, I don’t know what specifically the lawsuit was based on) without malice intended. The Apple way is to try and have design be silent and in the background. In this case it was a way to solve degrading batteries that would cause a phone to reboot, so slowing down to compensate is a slick way of preventing random reboots without involving the user. Since it doesn’t seem to be the case that this happened without battery degradation, I don’t think you can point to evidence that this was done to cause new phone sales. Am I mistaken? [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/apple-to-pay-up-to-500-million-to-settle-u-s-lawsuit-over-slow-iphones-idUSKBN20P2E7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/...
        oblio 6y ago
        > “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.” That's literally the text used by everyone that settles. Apple employs enough lawyers to populate a small country. Nobody with that kind of legal firepower gives up a lawsuit by settling for a million of $300 million and up to $500 million for no good reason. They settled for the same reasons everyone settles: 1. Because they can afford to pay. 2. Because they know they're going to lose (and they would probably have to pay more and may even be punished in some other ways, on top of that). It's obvious I can't prove this myself, but they didn't disclose it and only did so when their hand was forced by third parties investigating and after this settlement. I mean, what would they have to do to be assumed malicious, in this case? If basically losing a class action lawsuit is not enough, what is? Tim Cook coming up on stage and admitting it? It's not even their first example of thinly veiled for-profit malicious moves, such as the removal of the headphone jack (presented at the time as due to space reasons, reason immediately debunked by many people disassembling phones).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

shajznnckfke 6y ago

Having used Android and iOS devices, old and new, on average my experience is that the iOS devices perform well for years longer. Although installing custom versions on XDA can sometimes get more life out of abandoned hardware (I’m not sure if the jailbreak scene for iOS is similar, because I never felt the stock OS was missing anything).

izacus 6y ago
> Having used Android and iOS devices, old and new, on average my experience is that the iOS devices perform well for years longer. The main reason for this is hardware though - there's always plenty of conspiracy theories around that, but the biggest issues we've seen across Android ecosystem are due to flash. Cheap eMMC flash with lowend controllers degrades pretty quickly (within 3-4 years) and you suddenly start seeing like 20-3000ms read times of a single settings file. Since a lot of apps just read those files on UI thread, this results in a lot of stuttering because developers expect < 16ms response times for those reads. Writes get even worse - it's not rare to see 500ms+ times for writes to configuration files of < 1KB in size, especially if there are multiple parallel writes queued (common in browsers when they cache webpages for example). Apple and higher end Android devices tend to use better SSD quality flash which tends to last years longer than eMMC one and thus the devices don't slow down that much.
- azinman2 6y ago
  This is very interesting and the first time I’ve heard anyone discuss this. Do you have data / benchmarks you could point to? It would certainly address a lot of “planned obsolescence” criticisms by making it more plain the cause of the slowdown.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Unfortunately this mostly comes from my professional projects as Android developer and large-scale profiling data. It was confirmed by many devices I got to debug and "fix" when slowed down, but that's more anectodal. I don't really have links to actual research on phones though - although eMMC degradation is a pretty researched topic itself.

reaperducer 6y ago

slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware. According to what I read here on HN, iOS devices have a longer usable lifespan than Android devices, and are officially supported much longer. Is that no longer the case?

alisonkisk 6y ago
Parent is talking about running an unsupported OS on their Android device.
extremeMath 6y ago
It's impossible to know since Apple users are extremely subjective. It's better to just avoid them IMO. It's well documented the anti-consumer policies done by Apple. It's easy to see them poor money into massive advertising campaigns. Consider the highly likely situation where someone bought a multi hundred dollar device, is disappointed, and need to justify it to themselves.

lostlogin 6y ago

There is an iPad 2 on the bench here that is used most days. It’s just fine. Whatever Apple has done to it seems to have helped it, particularly it’s battery life which is ok, but worse than when new.

alisonkisk 6y ago

Those "slowed down" iOS devices are nowhere near as slow as your "sluggish" Android apps.

vetinari 6y ago
In my chart, the record holder is iPhone 3G after iOS 4 update. I don't remember any Android device being so slow.
extremeMath 6y ago
I wonder if you are used to animations hiding the loading time for you. I've never noticed a slow android outside 100$ crap, but I did notice how slow the iphone animations are

zozbot234 6y ago

Looks like the pmOS folks are working on mainline support for this device, so it might be able to run non-Android OS's in the future, as well. That's quite nice. Though I'm not sure how the latest mobile stack (phosh, and the like) would run on a 2GB RAM device. (I do know that 2GB is a bit tight for the usual gnome-shell environment, so there's that.)

GeekyBear 6y ago

If Apple wanted to use software updates to force people to upgrade their hardware, the original iPhone SE wouldn't be starting it's sixth year of OS and security updates. Also, it's more problematic to me that when faced with customers reporting the same "this phone randomly dies while showing that it has a good charge" issue on the Nexus 6p, Google never fixed the issue. >If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger. https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-randomly-dying-its-not-just-you-0175625/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random... Eventually they just marked the issue as won't fix. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shutdown-fixed/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...

jccalhoun 6y ago

That really depends on the hardware. If there isn't someone willing to maintain the project then your device won't get community updates. My last phone stopped getting manufacturer updates and progress on community made roms was slow so I went with an pixel 4a.