I have the opposite experience with Android. My Nexus 5X now went from version 6 to 7 to 8, and that's not including the minor version updates. It hasn't gotten any slower. Looks like it will last a few more years easily.

Storage degradation is the only thing that worries me, I wish more companies made phones with microSD slots. Modern microSD cards are cheap and fast.

My old Apple devices, for comparison, are useless bricks.

That's nice. I don't remember which Android version it was, but it made my Nexus 7 unusable. After the update it would take minutes to start a web browser. I put it in a drawer and haven't used it since.

My Samsung is definitely slower than it was few OS upgrades ago. It's becoming an annoyance. My at-the-time-google-owned-Motorola did't receive any updates. My Google Nexus tablet became completely unusable (like, really, really unusable, not just slow). With older devices, Android 2.x was horrible from the go, so I don't know if it could get worse (and there were only minor updates anyway).

A very small sample, I know. But part of my post was to point out that Apple users can consider themselves lucky at least in the regard that they do receive updates.

You're confusing the slowness caused by the updates (which doesn't exist on Android) with the slowness caused by the flash storage degradation (which absolutely does exist). I too have an old Nexus 10, which died from that cause, a common problem.

That's exactly why I think microSD support is so important. Your old card got slow? Buy a new one for $20, copy the files over, done.

Ah, I see. Well that might be the cause for the Samsung device. It has an SD card slot, but I don't think that will help much now (good to know for future I guess). As for this

> which doesn't exist on Android

it's simply not true. Google pushed updates[1] to old Nexus devices that extremely hindered the performance. Downgrade made them fine again. I'm fairly certain it isn't a unique case, and Google wasn't the only one forcing shit upgrades on their customers.

1. quick find, but should be enough https://forums.androidcentral.com/google-nexus-7-tablet-2012...

There's absolutely no way updating a few dozen apps takes 6 hours because of the OS. It's the classic flash degradation symptom. My Nexus 10 is the same. It didn't get slow after the updates, it progressively slower over a couple of years.