> 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.