The main reason for this is hardware though - there's always plenty of conspiracy theories around that, but the biggest issues we've seen across Android ecosystem are due to flash.

Cheap eMMC flash with lowend controllers degrades pretty quickly (within 3-4 years) and you suddenly start seeing like 20-3000ms read times of a single settings file. Since a lot of apps just read those files on UI thread, this results in a lot of stuttering because developers expect < 16ms response times for those reads. Writes get even worse - it's not rare to see 500ms+ times for writes to configuration files of < 1KB in size, especially if there are multiple parallel writes queued (common in browsers when they cache webpages for example).

Apple and higher end Android devices tend to use better SSD quality flash which tends to last years longer than eMMC one and thus the devices don't slow down that much.

I don't really have links to actual research on phones though - although eMMC degradation is a pretty researched topic itself.

Also, it's more problematic to me that when faced with customers reporting the same "this phone randomly dies while showing that it has a good charge" issue on the Nexus 6p, Google never fixed the issue.

>If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.

https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...

Eventually they just marked the issue as won't fix.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...

I think there is a good faith way to interpret Apple's aging battery policy, of course, it would be a lot easier to interpret it that way if they handled repairs in a way that wasn't hostile to users.

BTW if you like your tablet a lot, that's cool; if you're just holding on to it because you don't want to get a new one, and you live in a big city, there's a good chance somebody is literally throwing away higher spec tablets within a couple km of you.

You could imagine this happening because some engineering team was tasked with fixing crashes from reduced battery capacity, and some product people who would have been responsible with informing the user weren’t in the loop or dropped the ball. Alternatively, you could suspect those product people saw a good opportunity for planned obsolescence with plausible deniability and took it.

Either way, the eventual outcome (an outcry from customers and bad PR, followed by a more transparent software solution from Apple plus a subsidized repair program) seems fair.

>In the months and years following the launch, many Nexus 6P owners noticed their phones would bootloop or simply shut down without warning. The law firm Chimicles & Tikellis filed a class action lawsuit in 2017, and it looks like a resolution is on the horizon. Nexus 6P owners may be eligible for as much as $400 in restitution from Google and Huawei.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/06/07/google-and-huawei-a...

It’s entirely possible the lack of clarity of what was happening violated consumer protection laws (I’m guessing, I don’t know what specifically the lawsuit was based on) without malice intended. The Apple way is to try and have design be silent and in the background. In this case it was a way to solve degrading batteries that would cause a phone to reboot, so slowing down to compensate is a slick way of preventing random reboots without involving the user. Since it doesn’t seem to be the case that this happened without battery degradation, I don’t think you can point to evidence that this was done to cause new phone sales. Am I mistaken?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/...

That's literally the text used by everyone that settles. Apple employs enough lawyers to populate a small country. Nobody with that kind of legal firepower gives up a lawsuit by settling for a million of $300 million and up to $500 million for no good reason.

They settled for the same reasons everyone settles:

1. Because they can afford to pay.

2. Because they know they're going to lose (and they would probably have to pay more and may even be punished in some other ways, on top of that).

It's obvious I can't prove this myself, but they didn't disclose it and only did so when their hand was forced by third parties investigating and after this settlement.

I mean, what would they have to do to be assumed malicious, in this case? If basically losing a class action lawsuit is not enough, what is? Tim Cook coming up on stage and admitting it?

It's not even their first example of thinly veiled for-profit malicious moves, such as the removal of the headphone jack (presented at the time as due to space reasons, reason immediately debunked by many people disassembling phones).

According to what I read here on HN, iOS devices have a longer usable lifespan than Android devices, and are officially supported much longer. Is that no longer the case?

It's better to just avoid them IMO. It's well documented the anti-consumer policies done by Apple. It's easy to see them poor money into massive advertising campaigns.

Consider the highly likely situation where someone bought a multi hundred dollar device, is disappointed, and need to justify it to themselves.