Same for my iPad 3. It runs iOS 9.3.5, too, and is barely usable. I only ever watch YouTube on it now. Apps load so slowly. The onscreen keyboard takes several seconds to pop up after tapping a text field.

I bought the iPhone 4S for 700€, the iPad 3 for 400€. And Apple simply decides to fuck people over by basically breaking their devices with a software update. Yes, the device still works, all functionality is still there, but using the device is an exercise in patience.

I don’t think Apple makes previous devices slower on purpose. But I think they do not care to keep them fast either … to help sales. They love to claim the majority of devices runs the latest iOS version. Great. But at the same time they made millions of devices obsolete by nagging users to install it.

This really isn't progress. iOS11 introduced practically nothing in the way of improvements or new features, but instead has made a lot of devices practically unusable.

My old iPad Air slowed a bit, but never into multiple tens of seconds. Maybe 3-4 seconds to enter multitasking view (which is bad enough, don't get me wrong).

What phone are you on? Have you tried a factory reset?

I've done a complete restore/set up new/bla bla bla... didn't do much. I have to either reboot or hard reset my phone almost every day because apps(even system apps, like messages) will either lock the entire phone up or just all start freezing signalling that's about to occur.

My phone is in perfect condition hardware wise, with great battery health etc(like over 90%). The battery runs down as fast as my 6 that had a defective battery apple replaced under that recall program. I was seriously debating keeping this phone for another six months at least, but if 11.1 doesn't fix it it's going on craigslist.

This is just hilariously inexcusable, it's almost ios 4 on the iphone 3G bad. Like my phone is pretty bad, but my roommates 6 will literally sit for yea, 10+ seconds waiting for the camera to actually be "ready". There's also random ENORMOUS lag when shooting photos/before tap to focus works/etc.

Do you mean multiple tenths of a second? Waiting 20-30 seconds for the camera app to open seems inconceivable.

There seems to be a small regression on older devices.

These days it's not as big of an issue due to most higher end phones having bigger memories (with more cells to wear out).

I fixed it by deleted all the music, syncing, and then manually selecting the music I wanted again. That got me back my free space and cleared the 'other' space. The device is now remarkably zippy again.

[Obviously I have other phones, but I still use the iPhone 4 as an iPod & podcast device.]

It is probably that Android users usually do not receive updates, so they can't complain that updates made their phones slower.

I don’t know if that’s true - I use a Nexus and it’s well supported in terms of updates - but I actually think it might be the way to go anyway. I would quite like a situation whereby my phone gets minor and patch releases, but I have to upgrade my phone to get the next major. That way, I can have some confidence I’ll get vital security fixes and minor features without huge performance penalties, and each major release can be very highly optimised for the latest hardware.

It is absolutely true. Outside of a few model lines which get directly supported by Google, software updates for Android phones are rare. This is one of the biggest causes of Android fragmentation -- for most people who have an Android phone, the version that came preinstalled is the only version that phone will ever have installed.

My wife's anecdotal experience says: yes, definitely. Yesterday we went and bought her the 8. We were going to do it anyways, but we made haste because of her phone woes (I myself don't use Apple products for other principalled reasons).

I am not a conspiracy theorist and I will not claim planned obsolescence, but her reliance/preference towards iPhone coupled with Apple's approach that leaves little consumer choice left us with that same little choice. And Apple got paid. I suppose their quality in general has earned them this leverage.

iOS 11 on the other hand is just garbage. It doesn’t run like shit only on older devicee, it runs like shit on a brand new iPhone 8 as well. Battery tests were abysmal. I woke up this morning because of an alarm on my iPad that was planned only on weekdays. WTF!! SUNDAY!!!

11.1 solves a lot of problems. Installing dev certs on all of my devices infected with 11 just so I can run the 11.1 beta.

The people want more features and fancy stuff, and that requires more compute power. I don't think Apple should be optimizing for their oldest phones, business wise. (I would not mind personally, using an iPhone 6 myself but have not updated to iOS 11)