Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years.

Between that and fragility of smartphones (mechanical damage, water damage), most people are bound to replace theirs every few years anyway.

> Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years.

My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine.

When it dies, I will most likely adopt one of my Lumia devices as main one, or will buy a 2nd hand Android device, instead of giving money to support bad OEMs

My Nokia N900 is 8 years old and still working good. Since a lot of it is free SW there are still some bugfixies made. Workarounds for quirks are well known and tested. A community is still there.

Just spent it a new battery very easily for 7 € for the years coming.

My SO's S3 is of more-less the same age and it's so slow that it's barely usable now. Still can't track down why - she is not a power user, she wasn't installing apps beyond the few things I installed her and the OS updates. My old S4, currently used by my brother, suffered the same fate, being slow even after a factory reset. I wonder where this comes from?

I'm surprised that the factory reset doesn't resolve the issue, it always has for me, turning my slow old phones back into shiny new ones again.

However do be aware that your perception of what is slow changes as you use newer devices which perform better, making older ones feel slower than they did before - much like a shiny new work PC makes your home PC feel slow (or vice-versa) - so that may partly explain it.

Finally, I've just breathed new life into my ageing Nexus 7 (2013) tablet by installing the custom ROM "AICP" on it, which has made a huge difference to its performance & battery life. I recommend giving it a whirl on your SO's S3 - download from http://dwnld.aicp-rom.com/?device=i9300 (though you'll need to read up elsewhere about installing custom ROMs if you've never done it before)

My S3 is also about the same age and is running mostly fine, except for two things: 1- the USB port is damaged and the phone sometimes doesn't charge or charges very slowly; I know it's probably a soldering problem, but I can't be bothered to fix it, and 2- the Facebook app frequently crashes and reboots the phone. I suspect this has more to do with Facebook being awful on Android, since I've seen it happening in other phones as well.

Point is, I won't change my S3 until it crumbles to dust, if I can help it. I don't understand the obsession with buying the latest mobile every 1-2 years.

Personal experience suggests that Android (or perhaps Linux?) slows down as the internal storage fills up.

Also, the GC on older Android devices is a mess. It does not take many apps hanging out in the background before things slow to a crawl.

I had some performance issues, but they got sorted out when swapped the battery for a new one.

A battery? How would that help? Not doubting you, just honest question. I feel like I'm missing something very important about how smartphones work.

Mmm... it also happened to me with my (now defunct) Galaxy S1. I can't explain it, but at some point its battery developed the "bloated, about to explode" look and the phone worked but it was very slow and crashed frequently. I changed the battery and everything was ok. Later it died of unrelated causes.

I guess the processor wasn't being fed properly in regards to electricity, meaning not executing at the speed it was supposed to or other side effects.

It's Google services. It's a huge library that's only growing larger.

> My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine.

Is it still getting security patches? If not then it's not running perfectly fine.

No and I don't care, because even Google doesn't care about us.

2 years update + 1 security for mobiles that cost more than a computer is not something I am willing to pay a premium for.

So if you're phone was part of a botnet wasting your battery and data cap would you care?

You should install lineage nightly to get most up to date security: https://download.lineageos.org/i9300

Thanks, but I am against rooting devices, never saw the value in risking to brick my expensive devices.

It might be running perfectly fine for his use case, you never know. The benefits are almost always compared with the financial liability and they vary for each of us.

Sorry but you are nowhere near the mean. We can't use your experience as a stand-in for the mean.

Sure, but we cannot use your words either.

Do you have an study available that I can refer to?

Same here. My iPhone 5s is simply not giving me any reason to update. My guess is it will work fine till next year's model.

> Bump it to 3-4 years then

My smartphone's getting on for 9 years old; I don't think I'm a key demographic ;)

But you may be the leading edge of what could easily become a "key demographic": people who don't upgrade for many years. It's possible that "things I could do with a new phone that I can't with my existing phone" will be worth less than the cost of a new phone for an increasing number of people. Or not. I don't think anyone knows for sure how that will evolve over the next decade or so.

Given the shift toward streaming services and away from relying on phone-local storage, do you think it's possible that phones could move from an ownership model to a rental model?

If so, then there might be greater pressure from phone rental agencies on the manufacturers to stabilise and fix bugs so that they can extract maximum value from the hardware.

Replace 2 years with 7 years and the logic doesn't change.

Not really. There's a considerable amout of people that regulary change their phone every 1 or 2 years because they like to have the last model even if they don't really need it.

Is there any research on how many do that across Europe, including new devices versus 2nd hand ones?

My anecdoticat evidence from even poor European countries suggest phones are renewed quite often (~2years). The horrible manufacturing quality of most modern devices ensures the market for 2nd hand devices stays small, because these things break easily.

To be honest, subjected to a "mildly aggressive & negligent" usage pattern, like mine, even an iphone will barely last more than 3 years and it will be in "far from good" condition after 1 year of usage!

Modern smartphones are simply not built to last unless you take exceptional good care of them. Or maybe it's just that me and the people I know tend to be "exceedingly violent" with our smartphones, dunno...

Personally, 5 of the 6 phones I've used in the last 14 years were still in great condition after the ~2 year contract period that I used them for (plus the one I'm currently using, but I don't get credit for that yet as it's only 4 months old). The one exception got dropped on a bus, and still works fine, but has a cracked but still functional screen.

I think most people are more like me, but there are indeed a non-negligible segment of the population like you (and my sister) who just destroy their phones. Based on everything I've seen, it's definitely more of a you thing than a modern phone thing.

I heard about that in TV some years ago but I don't remember the source. I suppose you can google for it and find the relevant information. I'm not sure if that resesrch included second hand devices but I'm pretty sure exists detailed information on this topic. Edit: typo

> until they either die or get stolen or screen cracked or phone soaked in water (but these problems will diminish when IP68 and Gorilla Glass 5 become more mainstream)

They say that for every new Gorilla glass. It'll always be super resistant against anything. Yet, the newest iPhones still scratch if you just have them in the same pocket as your keys for more than a day (personal experience). And it's still very easy to destroy the screen if the phone drops once (even though less of the screen will crack nowadays).

We are very far away from phones that you could use without screen protection and not see damages after 1-2 years. For a device that is supposed to be carried around all the time, modern phones show little resistance against scratches. But maybe that's just not possible to archive.

Scratches are one thing; you can work around them with disposable screen protectors. But we're talking about a device that's constantly carried around and used (I probably have my phone on me more often than my wallet). Gorilla glass or not, it falls from a meter onto a hard surface, and you have a screen to replace. You accidentally sit on it, and you may have a screen to replace. And given the prices of replacement parts, it often makes sense to just live with the crack[0] until you get a new phone, which is probably why I see so many people with spiderwebs on their phones every day.

--

[0] - Unless you want to take a risk and get someone to replace you just the broken glass, a process which involves some manual fumbling with heatguns and UV-hardened glues. Or, unless you live in Shenzhen, where they'll replace you the whole phone front (with electronics and all) for cheap, if you give them your phone front (which they presumably fix up later and resell to the next person).

> Gorilla glass or not, it falls from a meter onto a hard surface, and you have a screen to replace.

I dropped my Xperia Z1 Compact a bunch of times from that height, the screen is still fine...

> You accidentally sit on it, and you may have a screen to replace.

Solution: Don't ever put your phone in your back pocket.

That's an interesting insight on what happens in Shenzen. If the cost is a 2x or more lesser, I wonder why that is not a thriving business, even across countries

Yeah. I fixed my S4 in Shenzhen this way about a year ago. The official way to repair broken glass is to replace the whole screen, which then went for around $170. A repair shop once asked me for somewhere around $60 for just replacing the glass manually (heat & UV glue method, glass cost included). In Shenzhen, the girl replaced the whole phone front with all electronics and replaced my back camera for total of ~$20, in exchange for my broken phone front.

I used the occasion to ask for a front for S3. She sold me one for somewhere around $50 - because I didn't have the broken one for exchange - which I later used to fix my SO's phone myself. It's not that hard after you've seen how the Chinese do it, though a little stressful - I had to use a needle to punch through a speaker canal, which for some reason wasn't hollowed out properly :).

I guess the reason it works in Shenzhen is because that's the place where the phones are made and recycled - they have tons and tons of parts for every model imaginable, both from factories and from broken phones. Given how many different phone models are out there, I doubt any city except a major metropolis could sustain this type of market.

Also it only works for Samsung and Apple. As they are the only ones who actually profit from phones.