This is what pushed me back to Apple after a single Android device. After 18 months, it was running like crap, and when I bought it, it was considered one of the best flagship Android devices available (there was another that was equal, so it was a coin toss between them).

Yeah there's an Android Slowdown Syndrome that I don't know what it is... but Android has it. My wife's old iPhone 8 still runs fine. All my old android phones from that time are a mess.

I bought the first android phone, the G1, back in the day.

It had a peculiar bug where the entire phone would slowdown if you had too many text messages stored, among other things. A factory reset would fix it though.

A bit disappointing that solution still needs to be a thing.

AFAIK, it is usually caused by shitty eMMC/flash storage.

If it is almost full, the performance is degraded. If it is written a lot of data over time, performance is degraded too.

Maybe because most people compare budget Android phones to the Apple's flagships

I'm unsure this is true. I was certainly disappointed when I went for a Samsung S8 at launch and found it laggy and glitchy 12 months in, and unusable at 18 months. As a short term money saver, I bought a 2016 iPhone SE and was amazed to find it got 2 more years of updates before I finally decided to retire it.

Between lacking support and poor performance over and over in the Android ecosystem, it became a very easy decision to move over to the Apple lock-in unfortunately. Their phones generally stay out of my way and work snappily when I need them to.

It's a real shame to have had this experience, and to watch others around me have similar issues before jumping ship to Apple. I think the competition provided by the big Android vendors is important, but I just can't justify dropping money on a new device every 18 months.

I've been with Android since the beginning (though Apple everything else). But I'm just tired of needing a new phone every year just to get ok performance. A few weeks back I got a free iPhone 6, and was amazed at its performance. When I compared it to my OnePlus 2 phone from a year later, it's night and day performance wise. My next phone will be an iPhone, no question.

I had a top of the line samsung, and the _native_ google maps app was slower than a web view google maps on an iphone SE.

I think that there's a lot of stuff about tuning, but the latency story (at least up until 3 or 4 years ago) on Android has been absolutely garbage, no matter what geekbench scores the phones get.

Sony phones and the Google mainline phones seem to work well when I use them though (though ultimately lots of android apps are also just not very good)

I've experienced it up and down the Android line, top of the line Samsung, nexus, pixels and so on.

I have no idea what it is that causes it, but it's a thing.

iPhone SE series is exceptional. It's always flagship SoC performance for mid price.

Maybe there’s an AI that insinuates itself onto Android phones as it finds them

Google guarantees 5 years of security updates for Pixel phones now.

> I'm not a person with lots of free time

> CalyxOS on Android

Pick one.

Took about 10 minutes to install and most of that was just waiting for the os to transfer to the phone. Really easy install guide. Works great. I wouldn't ask grandma to do it, but the technical crowd here probably isn't scared of running a couple cli commands.

That still doesn't address the issue that it's community-supported and can disappear at any time. Cyanogenmod used to be the main alternative ROM back in the day, and disappeared virtually overnight? It came back as LineageOS but it still meant that people had to reinstall (or somehow convert their Cyanogen install into Lineage, if that's possible) which takes time.

There's also the endless juggles of "is this phone supported, do I need to root it, is the root current, no wait this version is just different enough from that version that I need a custom version of the ROM from a third party, oh the SOC means that the kernel can't be patched for security problems" and so on.

It's a non-trivial effort.

> There's also the endless juggles of "is this phone supported

Stop only caring after the fact if you've bought a device with a path to freedom.

Ah yes, the answer to "I would like a reasonable degree of support and security for my phone without having to be a full time sysadmin" is "treat your phone like a 1997 Linux PC project.

I devote significant time to avoiding taking on sysadmin tasks. Just got Frontier Fiber. Had always done my own network admin, but they throw in a couple of routers and I decided it was better to have something they supported than try to make sure I had coverage on every square inch (sorry from USA) of yard. We'll see if I am happy with that choice.

I can tolerate an extra install every five to ten years.