I used to think that was a joke, but since updating to ios 11 my 6s+ has been completely unusable. A bunch of the apps are now unresponsive for 5-10 seconds after they launch, the input lags and the standard ios animations are dropping a ton of frames. Battery is also sometimes draining 20-40% in a span of 15 minutes.

I have a 6s plus and had the exact same thing. Phone was totally unusable. But I did a full backup and reinstall and it’s gone back to normal speed. Feels like a new phone. Give it a try.

My 6 Plus turned to absolute sluggish crap after iOS 11. Will try the reinstall this week. Suspected that might be worth a try, but had been hoping the first two 0.x updates might've solved it first... no luck!

6s plus here too. So just backup, total reset, then restore? No battery replacement?

If so, I’m in for a try.

A common approach on Android. Nobody really seems to know exactly why, but evidently crap accumulates, either from old apps or from sloppy in-place OS upgrades. A full reset clears all the crap, and you start anew.

I prefer to skip even the backup step, instead relying on cloud sync for contacts etc, and manually dumping a couple apps.

Yes -- give it a try. My iPhone 7 Plus was nearly out of storage space, and also rather sluggish. Much of the storage space was being consumed by internal Apple files according to usage details within the Settings app.

After doing a full backup using iTunes, then resetting the phone to factory conditions, and finally restoring the iTunes backup -- my storage space returned to normal, and the speed increased dramatically.

I suspect that over time, internal files accumulate (e.g. log files & upgrade restoration points), and this accumulated cruft gradually consumes space & degrades performance.

Yeah it made it soooo much quicker. I was about to throw it in the bin. Now set for another year of retro phone. Mine was being really shitty though, it took a massive speed nose dive after ios11. If that’s what happened to you defo worth trying.

I thought I was just unlucky because nobody else shared the same experience as I have had, but you describe exactly the same behavior I've encountered since iOS11

Just try a full back up and reset and see what happens. It made mine back to normal

This did not work when I tried. Waste of time

Solely from a performance analysis standpoint, you've just perfectly described something using 100% CPU across all cores.

But you aren't reporting the phone being warm to the touch, so... hm.

Have you tried wiping and restoring it?

It could be interesting to back it up, wipe it (and maybe remove the SIM card for completeness?), install the worst performing apps on the fresh install, and _then_ (maybe wipe again(?), then) restore it back to normal.

If app performance is terrible in the fully-wiped state, I'd take the phone into an apple store (regardless of warranty status) just to see what they say.

Hmm. Just thought of this: maybe your battery is like the OP's from reddit but in really bad condition, and your phone is downclocking itself to compensate?

Was randomly browsing elsewhere and stumbled on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15627880

Adding this to my comment because it's relevant

My iPhone 6s Plus gets extremely hot, battery life sucks, camera doesn’t focus, and apps are not responsive. Whenever I’ve brought it to an Apple store they said there are no issues...

If your battery is dropping by a half in 15 minutes then clearly something is seriously wrong.

I would get your battery checked out for a start. Many of us (including myself) have iPhone 6s and seen no major issues.

mine does this randomly (6s+)

basically there are times when it will drop sigbnificantly in a short period, but i have also had it last significantly at 1% and go from ten to 1 in a second - then i rush to plug it in and as soon as I plug in the cablee it immediately jumps back to ~15%

so I think its both hardware and software...

That's iOS 11 which is fucked. Did you do the iOS 11 minor updates? They fixed most of the problems for me.

iOS 11 burns all its cycles rendering the animated poop icon. Meanwhile noone at Apple cares about performance or security anymore.

Do you charge it with a stand or fast charger? Anything with more amps than the original plug? If I do that it really screws up the phone and it loses charge really quick. A few days of old fashioned charging and it’s ok again. Same thing screwed up my wife’s iPhone battery

Not remotely true. The iPhone is designed to gracefully accept charging from, for instance, Apple's iPad chargers, which provide either 2x or 2.4x the power of the bundled iPhone charger. There is no evidence that this degrades the battery.

Now, if you use crappy 50-cent third-party chargers, I don't know what happens.

You say it’s not the but it is my exact experience of them. Happens every time. Tried it a few times to be sure it’s that. Using a Belkin dock and an Anker charger. Both decent enough brands.

It's up to the phone how many amps to draw from the charger. Just because the charger has a higher amp rating doesn't mean that the phone is drawing more current from it.

Voltage is applied, current is drawn. It’s basic physics. You’ll fry a phone by connecting a charger that operates at a higher voltage level, but it’s perfectly harmless use a charger with a higher amperage rating

There is a slight element of truth, faster charging is worse for battery health

iOS 11 was the same way on my 6s+. Then I swapped the device for a new one. It doesn’t feel nearly as sluggish. My battery works like it did on iOS 10. My old device had a battery that was barely in the acceptable range. Obviously, my experience is anecdotal.

I had a similar problem with my iPhone 6. Doing a clean iOS reinstall and backup restore made everything much better. Apps open a lot faster.

Not for my phone it didn't. I noticed a marginal improvement at best and still nowhere near the performance iOS 10 had.

If you're on the fence on whether you should upgrade from an iPhone 6 or lower definitely stay away.

That's interesting. Meanwhile my 6 is just fine with ios 11. No weird lags or battery draining either.

When did you buy your iPhone 6?

I have a ton of lag on my 6 on iOS 11. I bought it roughly 3 years ago

I got mine about the same time.

I'm light on battery though. No movies, no books, a wee of games, some browsing. Heaviest use is sports tracker and maps. I do use it for testing apps nearly daily. But usually it's hooked up to Xcode.

That was iOS 11 and 11.1; 11.2 is actually back to normal.

Do you use Google Voice? The latest updates are horribly unresponsive. I think they are sending data to Google with each key typed and all on the main thread.

If they purposely want to slow down older phones, they will do it in a way like this that gives them plausible deniability, so I wouldn't discount the possibility.

> There's a decades-long meme that Apple purposefully slows down older hardware to push people to buy completely new hardware.

I seem to recall the first several years—maybe even the first decade—of OS X being marked by each new release being faster on the same hardware, though dropping support for the oldest hardware. It was definitely true for the first few releases of OX X, because 10.0 was notoriously sluggish. I also don't recall any slowdowns with my 2006 iMac across the several upgrades it received before Apple made 64-bit firmware a hard requirement.

If there's any truth to the meme you cite, it probably stems from the mobile side of things, where iOS started out fairly efficient but the hardware was very underpowered. (And in that case, I'd like to point out that the iPhone is only 10.5 years old.)

At that point Apple sold the OS upgrades, though, and now they only make money on the hardware (well, and services etc., but not on OS sales). So it makes sense that things have changes as their incentives have realigned, in addition to the factors you cite.

Apple has never sold updates for iPhones. What you’re misremembering is them selling updates for iPod touches back at iOS 2 because of some perceived accounting issue, and the cost was pretty token, something like $5-10 IIRC correctly. Hardly a cash cow that would have had them making more optimisations then they do today

I was talking about OSX upgrades :-)

Entirely the mobile side of things due to upgrading iOS. I was forced to upgrade from iOS 10 to 11 on my iPhone 6 to be allowed to use two factor authentication for my work place. Instantly it become a sluggish mess.

I feel like Apple (and any other manufacturers that do this) may be vulnerable to a class action here. If the article is true and performance tanks over 40% in 2 years, then planned obsolescence isn't just a conspiracy theory anymore. It's real and they have never disclosed it.

It’s done in a deviously clever way, though. It’s not “planned obsolescence” if it’s “performance scaling for battery life optimization” combined with “you can always buy a new battery.”

Only consumers are not made aware they can. Nobody knew the battery was the cause of the slow down, and apple certainly did nothing to let you know.

The court will have their own opinion, and probably would not agree with Apple.

This effect has been in here since iOS 10.2.1; so it doesn’t explain any slowdown that occurred prior to that OS release

It’s very real though. A fresh clean reset of my old iPhone 7 had a significantly lower Geekbench score, and that went away after the battery (capacity: 78% of design) was replaced.

This is an extraordinary chart! Amazing insight

Not completely related, but my parents’ iPad Mini (first generation) became really slow over the last year or so, lots of freezing, some system apps refusing to open etc.

I was preparing to do a backup, wipe and restore (which made my first gen iPad Retina somewhat usable again) but first thought I’d try some of the tips online for speeding up iPads, and to my surprise it really worked and made it much more responsive.

If I remember correctly, the ones that seemed to make the most difference were: disabling animations (in accessibility) and disabling any kind of notifications/background app refresh/auto update, but if you’re in a similar situation it’s certainly worth trying some of the other tips in guides like https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/ipad/how-speed-up-slow-ipa... and if that doesn’t help, doing a backup and restore.

> Interesting that this effect may be a byproduct of automatic scaling the CPU frequency based on remaining battery capacity, rather than the newer OS versions being purposefully poorly optimized (like most people assume)

1. If such a common complaint has such a simple fix, why isn't Apple shouting this information from the rooftops? Why do we need anecdotal information posted on Reddit to figure this one out ten years after the launch of the first iPhone?

2. Being a byproduct of automatic scaling or the commonly cited flash degradation doesn't explain the abrupt spikes in the search for "iPhone slow" around the release of a new iPhone (Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...). Could it be a purely subjective, psychological effect? Does anyone have actual benchmark data on this?

Why not both?

People would not notice drastic performance issues after doing an iOS upgrade if it was just the battery.