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It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus becaus

It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus because it was getting so slow I sometimes could not get the camera to open as it loaded the system down too much. This was despite the fact that the system said my battery was not degraded (it had been replaced with Apple Care a couple of times). Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. And faster phones are nice, but I think it is worth considering how valuable that really is to us as users and a society, especially if the process involves making loads and loads of ewaste and consuming tons of new resources, and all the emissions their mining and transport involves, when we could simply keep our software slim and our old devices functional. And the big companies will never do this. Do we need to force them to allow open software to run on these devices, so that clean builds can be patched and maintained when the company over bloats them or abandons them?

sanswork 3y ago
I don't update my phone every year but I also don't really want the progress of software or tech in general determined by the laggards.
- kimbernator 3y ago
  I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"
  - sanswork 3y ago
    An improved camera can't be something applied in software, a faster chip can't be applied in software. So by your own standard every version is warranted.
    - kimbernator 3y ago
      "significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement. The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases. My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
      - sanswork 3y ago
        Just because you don't value the type of improvements doesn't mean there aren't improvements. It just means you probably don't need to upgrade this year.
      - admax88qqq 3y ago
        And yet compare this years phone to a phone 5 years old. There is a large different. It just so happens that the yearly increase isn't seen as "significant" to you.
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        When you say "seen as", are you trying to imply that they're wrong? Because what you said can be true without them being wrong at all. It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change. So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases. Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    But it's silly to imply that there would be a new release every October even if they hadn't designed a new phone and prepared it for mass manufacture. What determines whether each release is "warranted" is, roughly, whether people buy the new one.
  - ImprovedSilence 3y ago
    im all about keeping my phone 5+ years, but I think that “significant” progress is likely only realized in small incremental amounts..
  - dheera 3y ago
    The reason Google releases a phone every October is because Apple releases a phone around the same time.
  - ako 3y ago
    Having a cadence helps improve quality by standardization and repetition. It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality, and releasing often reduces risks by making smaller changes.
    - gambiting 3y ago
      >> It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  If anything it seems to me like hardware advances are directly correlated with increasingly worse software.
  - sanswork 3y ago
    People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly). Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.
    - Barrin92 3y ago
      > From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face. We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20
      - drchickensalad 3y ago
        The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.
- jen20 3y ago
  Indeed so: I do replace mine every year because each generation has a successively better camera, and I value being able to take better pictures with the device I have available [1] more than I value the incremental cost to me of selling the old one and buying a new one each year (and iPhones hold their value very well!) By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them. [1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...
kimbernator 3y ago
I know there have been cases where companies seem to intentionally slow down old phones to encourage new sales, but it doesn't really even require an "evil" motive. By releasing new hardware yearly, they are dramatically increasing their workload by having to support every device. On top of that, there's the perverse incentive that spending the money to release timely, high-quality updates to previous-generation devices will actually have a negative impact on their bottom line by reducing new sales.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kaba0 3y ago
> And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup. Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers). Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use. I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  > People on average change their phones every 3 years People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.
  - kimbernator 3y ago
    This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-does-the-average-american-replace-his-or.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...
    - jen20 3y ago
      Of course - it's not like the monthly bill becomes less if you have a phone taken from a carrier, so you should change it out immediately.
vel0city 3y ago
I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.
- lencastre 3y ago
  is there something like crystaldiskinfo for iOS?
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Perhaps SDcard isn't the right standard. Or some stress testing certification is in order
whatscooking 3y ago
There’s no such thing as the iPhone 7S Plus, but nice story
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  Or there are such things as regional exclusives. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-iphone-8-iphone-7s-iphone-7s-plus-coming-on-september-12-report-117082900403_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-ip...
  - fh9302 3y ago
    The iPhone 7S does not exist. You have linked to a pre-release rumour article for a non-existent device.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Ah I was always a bit foggy on that, I bought it about 7 years ago. I guess it was just the normal 7 Plus.
danielheath 3y ago
That’s specifically covered under new EU ewaste laws - upgrades the impair device performance must be fixed in a reasonable timeframe.
- dmoy 3y ago
  Does that cover e.g. flash degradation over time from just normal write cycles?
  - danielheath 3y ago
    No, but given how stark the slowdown often is after an os update… I don’t think that’s what has happened
    - vel0city 3y ago
      An OS update does a lot of writes though. Its downloading a several gig file, unpacking lots of tiny files, shuffling them all around etc. Its probably one of the most disk intensive things a phone will do. And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance. I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.
winter_blue 3y ago
> Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much? I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up. There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  There would be such an incentive, yes, and even more: set the number of digits to compute as proportional to the age of the model. But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Opening the Camera app on iPhone is one of the most demanding tasks it can possibly do. Doing it and doing it fast means powering up the image sensor and its supporting hardware (ISP, ML hardware, etc.) and immediately terminating all non-essential tasks on the device so it can dedicate it to this. If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2Fxnu%20Camera&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.
  - dieortin 3y ago
    But it also did all that when new, and the camera still opened fast.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      There’s a lot more going on in the background on your phone now.
blackoil 3y ago
How real are the security risks? My wife is using Oneplus 5t about 6 years old. It doesn't feel slow, cam may not be greatest, but pretty good. Battery life is one day with mild usage. It is stuck on Android 10, but play services and apps are updated.
- Tom4hawk 3y ago
  This how it works or most people in the world. They get a phone and they change it only when they are forced to (hardware failure, some app they absolutely need stops working etc.). The group of people changing phones because they are no longer supported with security fixes is very small. This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support). About your question: Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D
- haspok 3y ago
  I have the same phone, and the main culprit is the connectors. The audio jack connector has gone a few years ago, now the USB-C is getting worse - I need to sometimes wiggle the cable to connect the charger. If I use a headphone then the smallest motion might disconnect it. This is the only reason why I'm considering getting a new phone - battery is still around 75% capacity (after 6 years of daily use!), otherwise still performant enough, runs any apps I use without a problem.
rimliu 3y ago
So you think, when someone upgrades their phone they throw perfectly working "old" phone into trash?
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  Yes. I have drawers full of them which I have no use for and will likely be thrown out.

sanswork 3y ago

I don't update my phone every year but I also don't really want the progress of software or tech in general determined by the laggards.

kimbernator 3y ago
I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"
- sanswork 3y ago
  An improved camera can't be something applied in software, a faster chip can't be applied in software. So by your own standard every version is warranted.
  - kimbernator 3y ago
    "significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement. The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases. My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
    - sanswork 3y ago
      Just because you don't value the type of improvements doesn't mean there aren't improvements. It just means you probably don't need to upgrade this year.
    - admax88qqq 3y ago
      And yet compare this years phone to a phone 5 years old. There is a large different. It just so happens that the yearly increase isn't seen as "significant" to you.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        When you say "seen as", are you trying to imply that they're wrong? Because what you said can be true without them being wrong at all. It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change. So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases. Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  But it's silly to imply that there would be a new release every October even if they hadn't designed a new phone and prepared it for mass manufacture. What determines whether each release is "warranted" is, roughly, whether people buy the new one.
- ImprovedSilence 3y ago
  im all about keeping my phone 5+ years, but I think that “significant” progress is likely only realized in small incremental amounts..
- dheera 3y ago
  The reason Google releases a phone every October is because Apple releases a phone around the same time.
- ako 3y ago
  Having a cadence helps improve quality by standardization and repetition. It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality, and releasing often reduces risks by making smaller changes.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >> It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.
hamandcheese 3y ago
If anything it seems to me like hardware advances are directly correlated with increasingly worse software.
- sanswork 3y ago
  People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly). Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    > From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face. We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20
    - drchickensalad 3y ago
      The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.
jen20 3y ago
Indeed so: I do replace mine every year because each generation has a successively better camera, and I value being able to take better pictures with the device I have available [1] more than I value the incremental cost to me of selling the old one and buying a new one each year (and iPhones hold their value very well!) By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them. [1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...

kimbernator 3y ago

I know there have been cases where companies seem to intentionally slow down old phones to encourage new sales, but it doesn't really even require an "evil" motive. By releasing new hardware yearly, they are dramatically increasing their workload by having to support every device. On top of that, there's the perverse incentive that spending the money to release timely, high-quality updates to previous-generation devices will actually have a negative impact on their bottom line by reducing new sales.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kaba0 3y ago

> And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup. Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers). Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use. I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
> People on average change their phones every 3 years People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.
- kimbernator 3y ago
  This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-does-the-average-american-replace-his-or.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...
  - jen20 3y ago
    Of course - it's not like the monthly bill becomes less if you have a phone taken from a carrier, so you should change it out immediately.

vel0city 3y ago

I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.

lencastre 3y ago
is there something like crystaldiskinfo for iOS?
chimeracoder 3y ago
> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.
- vel0city 3y ago
  If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Perhaps SDcard isn't the right standard. Or some stress testing certification is in order

whatscooking 3y ago

There’s no such thing as the iPhone 7S Plus, but nice story

cmcaleer 3y ago
Or there are such things as regional exclusives. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-iphone-8-iphone-7s-iphone-7s-plus-coming-on-september-12-report-117082900403_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-ip...
- fh9302 3y ago
  The iPhone 7S does not exist. You have linked to a pre-release rumour article for a non-existent device.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Ah I was always a bit foggy on that, I bought it about 7 years ago. I guess it was just the normal 7 Plus.

danielheath 3y ago

That’s specifically covered under new EU ewaste laws - upgrades the impair device performance must be fixed in a reasonable timeframe.

dmoy 3y ago
Does that cover e.g. flash degradation over time from just normal write cycles?
- danielheath 3y ago
  No, but given how stark the slowdown often is after an os update… I don’t think that’s what has happened
  - vel0city 3y ago
    An OS update does a lot of writes though. Its downloading a several gig file, unpacking lots of tiny files, shuffling them all around etc. Its probably one of the most disk intensive things a phone will do. And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance. I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.

winter_blue 3y ago

> Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much? I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up. There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
There would be such an incentive, yes, and even more: set the number of digits to compute as proportional to the age of the model. But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.
saagarjha 3y ago
Opening the Camera app on iPhone is one of the most demanding tasks it can possibly do. Doing it and doing it fast means powering up the image sensor and its supporting hardware (ISP, ML hardware, etc.) and immediately terminating all non-essential tasks on the device so it can dedicate it to this. If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2Fxnu%20Camera&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.
- dieortin 3y ago
  But it also did all that when new, and the camera still opened fast.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    There’s a lot more going on in the background on your phone now.

blackoil 3y ago

How real are the security risks? My wife is using Oneplus 5t about 6 years old. It doesn't feel slow, cam may not be greatest, but pretty good. Battery life is one day with mild usage. It is stuck on Android 10, but play services and apps are updated.

Tom4hawk 3y ago
This how it works or most people in the world. They get a phone and they change it only when they are forced to (hardware failure, some app they absolutely need stops working etc.). The group of people changing phones because they are no longer supported with security fixes is very small. This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support). About your question: Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D
haspok 3y ago
I have the same phone, and the main culprit is the connectors. The audio jack connector has gone a few years ago, now the USB-C is getting worse - I need to sometimes wiggle the cable to connect the charger. If I use a headphone then the smallest motion might disconnect it. This is the only reason why I'm considering getting a new phone - battery is still around 75% capacity (after 6 years of daily use!), otherwise still performant enough, runs any apps I use without a problem.

rimliu 3y ago

So you think, when someone upgrades their phone they throw perfectly working "old" phone into trash?

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
Yes. I have drawers full of them which I have no use for and will likely be thrown out.