What do you attribute that to? Is it software updates that slow it down or some kind of pile up of junk that somehow slows it down like Windows 95 used to get?
> On top of that you have constant tweaks and changes…
Yeah, that exists on the iPhone too. Can’t think of anything off the top of my head but I promise you they make things worse sometimes with redesigns and take a few point releases (or even entire releases) to fix them.
I'll add that in addition to software, Android hardware typically experience more NAND degradation, which can slow the phone down. A possible explanation being that iPhones use NVMe storage vs the cheaper eMMC/UFS type found on Android.
99% latencies increase as the flash memory wears or fills, and I think the UI gets intermittently blocked on writes.
Compare that to Android 12 on Pixel phones. Users can't make phone calls due to some bug, and Google is going to provide a fix by the end of January! Do you think they'd delay it that long if they used their own products?
iOS may be locked down like crazy and have UX from 10 years ago, and the keyboard is atrocious (even swiftkey is way worse than the android version), but it works reliably.
My partner has an iPhone 8 that still works perfectly fine, and much faster than my 3 year old flagship Android. Why the performance degrades after 2 years, I have no clue, plus it happens across brands (seen it with Samsung, LG, Sony)...
However this is a hit and miss affair. You need to buy your phone with this in mind (always do this, even if you don't intend to use it yet) and many are quite unstable (LineageOS and /e/ are quite good).
I'm back on Android for now (it has some apps and freedoms I prefer), but I have been at a point recently at which I have said holy shit, fuck this and bought an iPhone. And it was nice. No constant worrying whether my battery would suddenly drain to 0. Much, much, much fewer random delays, frame drops and stutters. And that's on an iPhone X.
have you tried lineageos? My 5 year android phone (flagship) is still usable with lineageos. The only lags I get are from heavy SPAs inside firefox.
Recently got access to Windows 10 LTSC from a company I worked with and installed it on my workstation, super fast compared to the modern version I was using (LTSC build is 3 years old IIRC) and didn't find any downside compared to 10 Pro, so can recommend that for any dev that feels like their machine is too slow.
as for disabling bloat in non-LTSC versions, there's various scripts floating around, eg. https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline/ or https://ameliorated.info/
On top of that you have constant tweaks and changes - often on useless things. This year, an update "improved" the clock app. It's now harder to set alarms - and about once per week I get an alarm going off without any UI to disable it. I just have to reset my phone.
Why in the world does a stable, reliable feature like the clock app suddenly introduce a major change.