4 ms·

In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple repo

In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating, and disks due to cell degradation, but it's certainly a mystery.

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
That interpretation is incredibly generous to the companies that benefit from you feeling a need to replace that phone.
jacquesm 3y ago
It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.
- palata 3y ago
  I like to call it "premature obsolescence". I don't believe that the manufacturers actively try to make your old phone get slower. Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower. Maybe I am being pedantic, but I think it is different: it is _not_ that manufacturers actively pay their devs to make the phones slower (which would be planned obsolescence), but rather they _do not pay_ the devs to make sure the old phones _do not get slower_. The latter is "passive", that's (to me) premature obsolescence: the manufacturer could fight premature obsolescence, but it has a cost (and obviously they don't want to pay for it).
  - noirscape 3y ago
    There's some degree of active involvement with this. I've long suspected Apple to do this for example. The best version of iOS for any iDevice is usually the one just before the one that they use as the hard cutoff point. Granted, my big example of this is quite old (the iPhone 4 would run iOS 6 really well, while on iOS 7 it was a glitchy, slow, battery-draining mess) but it does seem to be a common trend (my last Apple phone, the iPhone 5 ran quite well on iOS 9 but would just have a complete breakdown if you installed iOS 10). They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.
    - Tagbert 3y ago
      “ They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.” Are you going to just drop an inflammatory statement like that and not even try to provide any information to back it up?
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Is google down or something? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay-113-million-to-settle-batterygate-case-over-iphone-slowdowns https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
        Tagbert 3y ago
        “caught red-handed” implies an intent that is not supported by the evidence. The design of the battery in the 6 turned out to be problematic once the battery reached a certain age. After lots of reports of iPhones shutting down suddenly, Apple issued a software update that slowed down those phones so that they didn’t shut down. They then redesigned the battery and this was not a problem in later models. You talk about a general slow down of phones when the OS is updated. That is most likely due to increased processing needed in later OSs. The early phone CPUs had barely enough processing to do what they needed to do so the added demands of a new OS would drag them down a little. Over time the cumulative effect would add up. This is not unique to iPhones. I have heard the same complaints from Android users. Fortunately modern phone CPUs are powerful enough that they have the cycles to spare and slowdowns are rare.
jemmyw 3y ago
I haven't noticed this at all. My phone is 4 years old and feels just as fast as always. My previous one I remember thinking how snappy it was after a factory reset when I sold it on. The one before that died. The one before that kept its speed but the battery turned to shit and I couldn't be bothered trying to get it changed. I'm just about to replace this one but it's still in great working order so one of my kids wants it as their first phone. There was one Android device my wife had that got slower and slower and it was a known issue with the disk.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
Android seems to suffer from a phenomenon similar to "Windows creep" where performance decays over time for no reason in particular, even for users who are good stewards of their devices. It's more of an issue for some devices than it is for others for reasons that are unclear.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I used to think this at well, but then I removed all of the useless apps I'd gathered over the years. The improvements were almost instant. Installing apps doesn't have a noticeable impact on general system performance, but install enough of them and you'll find everything mote sluggish than you remember. My phone feels as fast as the day I bought it, which so far must've been about four years ago now. It came out with Android 9 and is currently running Android 13 through a custom ROM. Newer devices certainly feel snappier, but the old phone works as well as it ever did, except for the battery carrying almost half of its original capacity. I still have my OnePlus One and I can't say it feels like the phone is slower than when I bought it. I think the slowness is caused more by the change in perception thsnt be degradation of hardware and the ever growing software bloat. Modern phones software comes with fluid, high resolution, high speed animations and transitions everywhere that don't work well on older devices. Once you turn those off, you'll quickly find that many older devices will work just as well with modern software as they did with their older software. Bargain bin devices that come out with specs that can't even run the factory firmware are the exception, of course. However, that segment seems to have shrunk significantly since I last looked into buying a phone.
  - pizza234 3y ago
    Regarding my own case, it was a Google Nexus 5X. Performaed a factory reset, but the phone is still super-slow. 100% sure that this is not perception. I'm talking about seconds-long delays. Regarding the acquaintances, I don't remember (or know); I think a couple of them were old Samsung Galaxy S models. Again, factory reset didn't help. I guess that as parent posted, this problem affects some models more than others. I'm still really curious about the technical cause :)
RedShift1 3y ago
I had a Samsung Galaxy S2 and a Nexus 10 which both suffered from flash related problems making them incredibly slow. Samsung never fixed that nor was there ever a recall. I also owned a HTC One M7 which worked well for a very long time but it also got slow even though there were no hardware problems. The M7 worked just as good from day one if I factory reset it, it only becomes slow again once all the apps are updated. What I think is happening here is that apps move to the newer Android API but keep compatibility with older Android versions through compatibility layers, and they compound so once the entire compatibility layer stack becomes "too thick" the CPU gets bogged down and the whole thing becomes slow...
Levitz 3y ago
I finally made the switch last year, but I used a moto G (rather popular model, at least in Europe: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ ) for some 6 years. It did slow down at one point, but it came back to life after installing lineageos, so now I blame bloat for the slow down phones suffer from.
js8 3y ago
The bottleneck on the Asus phone I replaced recently and I had since 2017 or so (before that I had T-Mobile G1 for maybe 8 years) was the glass - it breaks really easily because there is no plastic protection along the edges as it used to be on older phones.
wesapien 3y ago
How old? I'm still using two LG V20's from 2016 and don't experience issues.
Toutouxc 3y ago
> CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating I might be wrong, but AFAIK this is not a thing within the usual timescales.
- pizza234 3y ago
  It can't be excluded. I remember a friend of mine overclocking his CPU (around 20 years ago!), and notificing that the maximum clock they could achieve, would decrease over time. I guess that when put under thermal stress (which may be the case for some phone, for whatever reason) may actually have a measurable effect.
summerlight 3y ago
It's probably due to old battery causing imperfect thermal control then extreme throttling. Phones are not really well tested on aged batteries since it's hard to artificially make such one that fits well to real world scenario, and manufacturers also don't have good incentives to do so.
fulafel 3y ago
One contributor is that most models get a mid life major Android version update after 2 ish years and those don't work as well as the launch versions. It's unlikely to be hardware problems you suggest. Flash ftl slowdown due to filling up or fragmentation from use might contribute though. There are some jank debugging tools on Android (eg system tracing found under dev settings), would be interesting to see what they report on a fresh vs slowness afflicted device.

RhodesianHunter 3y ago

That interpretation is incredibly generous to the companies that benefit from you feeling a need to replace that phone.

jacquesm 3y ago

It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.

palata 3y ago
I like to call it "premature obsolescence". I don't believe that the manufacturers actively try to make your old phone get slower. Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower. Maybe I am being pedantic, but I think it is different: it is _not_ that manufacturers actively pay their devs to make the phones slower (which would be planned obsolescence), but rather they _do not pay_ the devs to make sure the old phones _do not get slower_. The latter is "passive", that's (to me) premature obsolescence: the manufacturer could fight premature obsolescence, but it has a cost (and obviously they don't want to pay for it).
- noirscape 3y ago
  There's some degree of active involvement with this. I've long suspected Apple to do this for example. The best version of iOS for any iDevice is usually the one just before the one that they use as the hard cutoff point. Granted, my big example of this is quite old (the iPhone 4 would run iOS 6 really well, while on iOS 7 it was a glitchy, slow, battery-draining mess) but it does seem to be a common trend (my last Apple phone, the iPhone 5 ran quite well on iOS 9 but would just have a complete breakdown if you installed iOS 10). They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    “ They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.” Are you going to just drop an inflammatory statement like that and not even try to provide any information to back it up?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Is google down or something? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay-113-million-to-settle-batterygate-case-over-iphone-slowdowns https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
      - Tagbert 3y ago
        “caught red-handed” implies an intent that is not supported by the evidence. The design of the battery in the 6 turned out to be problematic once the battery reached a certain age. After lots of reports of iPhones shutting down suddenly, Apple issued a software update that slowed down those phones so that they didn’t shut down. They then redesigned the battery and this was not a problem in later models. You talk about a general slow down of phones when the OS is updated. That is most likely due to increased processing needed in later OSs. The early phone CPUs had barely enough processing to do what they needed to do so the added demands of a new OS would drag them down a little. Over time the cumulative effect would add up. This is not unique to iPhones. I have heard the same complaints from Android users. Fortunately modern phone CPUs are powerful enough that they have the cycles to spare and slowdowns are rare.

jemmyw 3y ago

I haven't noticed this at all. My phone is 4 years old and feels just as fast as always. My previous one I remember thinking how snappy it was after a factory reset when I sold it on. The one before that died. The one before that kept its speed but the battery turned to shit and I couldn't be bothered trying to get it changed. I'm just about to replace this one but it's still in great working order so one of my kids wants it as their first phone. There was one Android device my wife had that got slower and slower and it was a known issue with the disk.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

Android seems to suffer from a phenomenon similar to "Windows creep" where performance decays over time for no reason in particular, even for users who are good stewards of their devices. It's more of an issue for some devices than it is for others for reasons that are unclear.

jeroenhd 3y ago
I used to think this at well, but then I removed all of the useless apps I'd gathered over the years. The improvements were almost instant. Installing apps doesn't have a noticeable impact on general system performance, but install enough of them and you'll find everything mote sluggish than you remember. My phone feels as fast as the day I bought it, which so far must've been about four years ago now. It came out with Android 9 and is currently running Android 13 through a custom ROM. Newer devices certainly feel snappier, but the old phone works as well as it ever did, except for the battery carrying almost half of its original capacity. I still have my OnePlus One and I can't say it feels like the phone is slower than when I bought it. I think the slowness is caused more by the change in perception thsnt be degradation of hardware and the ever growing software bloat. Modern phones software comes with fluid, high resolution, high speed animations and transitions everywhere that don't work well on older devices. Once you turn those off, you'll quickly find that many older devices will work just as well with modern software as they did with their older software. Bargain bin devices that come out with specs that can't even run the factory firmware are the exception, of course. However, that segment seems to have shrunk significantly since I last looked into buying a phone.
- pizza234 3y ago
  Regarding my own case, it was a Google Nexus 5X. Performaed a factory reset, but the phone is still super-slow. 100% sure that this is not perception. I'm talking about seconds-long delays. Regarding the acquaintances, I don't remember (or know); I think a couple of them were old Samsung Galaxy S models. Again, factory reset didn't help. I guess that as parent posted, this problem affects some models more than others. I'm still really curious about the technical cause :)

RedShift1 3y ago

I had a Samsung Galaxy S2 and a Nexus 10 which both suffered from flash related problems making them incredibly slow. Samsung never fixed that nor was there ever a recall. I also owned a HTC One M7 which worked well for a very long time but it also got slow even though there were no hardware problems. The M7 worked just as good from day one if I factory reset it, it only becomes slow again once all the apps are updated. What I think is happening here is that apps move to the newer Android API but keep compatibility with older Android versions through compatibility layers, and they compound so once the entire compatibility layer stack becomes "too thick" the CPU gets bogged down and the whole thing becomes slow...

Levitz 3y ago

I finally made the switch last year, but I used a moto G (rather popular model, at least in Europe: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ ) for some 6 years. It did slow down at one point, but it came back to life after installing lineageos, so now I blame bloat for the slow down phones suffer from.

js8 3y ago

The bottleneck on the Asus phone I replaced recently and I had since 2017 or so (before that I had T-Mobile G1 for maybe 8 years) was the glass - it breaks really easily because there is no plastic protection along the edges as it used to be on older phones.

wesapien 3y ago

How old? I'm still using two LG V20's from 2016 and don't experience issues.

Toutouxc 3y ago

> CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating I might be wrong, but AFAIK this is not a thing within the usual timescales.

pizza234 3y ago
It can't be excluded. I remember a friend of mine overclocking his CPU (around 20 years ago!), and notificing that the maximum clock they could achieve, would decrease over time. I guess that when put under thermal stress (which may be the case for some phone, for whatever reason) may actually have a measurable effect.

summerlight 3y ago

It's probably due to old battery causing imperfect thermal control then extreme throttling. Phones are not really well tested on aged batteries since it's hard to artificially make such one that fits well to real world scenario, and manufacturers also don't have good incentives to do so.

fulafel 3y ago

One contributor is that most models get a mid life major Android version update after 2 ish years and those don't work as well as the launch versions. It's unlikely to be hardware problems you suggest. Flash ftl slowdown due to filling up or fragmentation from use might contribute though. There are some jank debugging tools on Android (eg system tracing found under dev settings), would be interesting to see what they report on a fresh vs slowness afflicted device.