That interpretation is incredibly generous to the companies that benefit from you feeling a need to replace that phone.

It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.

I like to call it "premature obsolescence". I don't believe that the manufacturers actively try to make your old phone get slower.

Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower.

Maybe I am being pedantic, but I think it is different: it is _not_ that manufacturers actively pay their devs to make the phones slower (which would be planned obsolescence), but rather they _do not pay_ the devs to make sure the old phones _do not get slower_. The latter is "passive", that's (to me) premature obsolescence: the manufacturer could fight premature obsolescence, but it has a cost (and obviously they don't want to pay for it).

There's some degree of active involvement with this. I've long suspected Apple to do this for example. The best version of iOS for any iDevice is usually the one just before the one that they use as the hard cutoff point.

Granted, my big example of this is quite old (the iPhone 4 would run iOS 6 really well, while on iOS 7 it was a glitchy, slow, battery-draining mess) but it does seem to be a common trend (my last Apple phone, the iPhone 5 ran quite well on iOS 9 but would just have a complete breakdown if you installed iOS 10).

They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.

“ They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.”

Are you going to just drop an inflammatory statement like that and not even try to provide any information to back it up?

Is google down or something?

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

That has nothing to do with "wrecking battery life" though. They added a fix to prevent the device from turning off early due to battery brownouts at lower states of charge. It did result in reduced performance (and they got a lawsuit cause they weren't open about why/how they did it) but this wasn't causing excessive battery drain.

Lets not use this case as a scapegoat and pretend that slowdowns don't exist in iOS.

Pretty much from the first iPhone model it's well known that newer iOS releases will slow down your phone and/or make your battery drain faster. I even remember when they actually broke wifi on a lot of phones with an update and pretended that the hardware was defective all the time (which it wasn't). Hell I'm looking right now my old iPhone 8 which got a new genuine battery, and it's a lagging, hot mess so I only use it when I don't want to burn the battery of my new phone.

My good colleague resisted updating her iPhone 11 to any newer version of iOS from the one she got, but couple of months ago she couldn't install her banking app anymore so she broke down and updated the OS. Instant laggines, and battery lost close to 40%. Just like that. She got mad, and when the madness subsided, she bought a new iPhone. Mission accomplished for Apple.

All of this could be much avoided if they would allow you to install previous versions of iOS, but they don't for obvious reasons. And before anyone mentions security, that is a load of BS because even previous iOS versions get patched up. So planned or premature obsolesence, the user just gets frustrated with an old phone which hardware-wise might be perfectly fine, but software-wise an unusable mess and buys a new phone. I hope the forced user battery replacement works, and I'm sure they could look into these forced software updates which are also largerly contributing to larger problem at hand.

The specific accusation was about 'wrecking battery life' and the source was the 'batterygate' lawsuits. This has nothing to do with a scapegoat.

Honestly, "it's well known" is anecdotal at best. If you're actually saying it was a problem that battery life dropped 40% from going from one update to another, then media would pick up on this. That's not a small amount here, you're saying battery is now 2/3 the previous runtime. If that was actually reliable and measurable, show me an article that has done testing on before-and-after from one update to another.

The Batterygate was just a partial response at iOS significantly slowing down even one generation old iPhones, and I don't want to go into that because that's not what I want to discuss.

In your second paragraph you completely dismiss my experience I guess because it wasn't published by some online zine which is ridiculous by itself. Online forums like reddit are full of these, my experience says the same, and pretty much the big majority of my friends have iPhones in this neck of woods and there is no question on whats going on. Why there are no articles about it? Dunno, maybe because by now its an old story as this is going on for decades now so it's an accepted fact. Maybe because in US people buy iPhones more often then in Europe so the effect isn't that noticeable? I don't know, and it's not in my interest to care.

So I'll put my claim into negative and ask you this: are you claiming that iPhones are not slowed down by newer updates? Are you claiming that perfectly good iPhones even as new as 1.5 years and older are as performant as the lastest gen iPhones with the same iOS (even with brand new batteries)? If so, thats an extraordinary claim and the burden of proof rests on your shoulders.

Are you also claiming that you're casually able to install previous versions of iOS so you could get performance back? If car industry did the same after software updates whole industries would collapse. Does your PC even do this nowadays? If you install an OS which actually slows down your computer, you can still re-install a previous version to get your performance back. Not so on the iPhone, you're locked out of that option and we'll screw you, buy a new one.

“caught red-handed” implies an intent that is not supported by the evidence.

The design of the battery in the 6 turned out to be problematic once the battery reached a certain age. After lots of reports of iPhones shutting down suddenly, Apple issued a software update that slowed down those phones so that they didn’t shut down. They then redesigned the battery and this was not a problem in later models.

You talk about a general slow down of phones when the OS is updated. That is most likely due to increased processing needed in later OSs. The early phone CPUs had barely enough processing to do what they needed to do so the added demands of a new OS would drag them down a little. Over time the cumulative effect would add up. This is not unique to iPhones. I have heard the same complaints from Android users. Fortunately modern phone CPUs are powerful enough that they have the cycles to spare and slowdowns are rare.

I have an iPhone XS. For what I do, the hardware is still perfectly capable. I use basically the same apps I used 5 years ago. Except now, I often can’t run more than 1 app at a time. I’ll have an app open, switch to another app and it’ll reload from scratch. Then when I switch back to the first app, it too will reload from scratch. Multitasking can be very painful.

My understanding is that apps use more RAM now because newer phones have more RAM. The result is that older phones with less RAM will aggressively kill apps because there just isn’t enough memory to go around.

As a developer I can see both sides of the coin. On one hand, I know it would be possible to reduce the memory consumption. On the other hand, I realise this would also cost more money. But it isn’t malice. Just a choice.

Apple as a manufacturer have gotten a lot better over the years. I remember when iOS updates made the iPhone 3G literally unusable, but that isn’t the case any more. I’m running iOS 16 on my iPhone XS with no performance issues at all. I expect iOS 17 to be just as fast. They also implement features to increase the longevity of their phones, like reducing performance and maximum power delivery when the battery is degraded. They were lamented for this feature but it genuinely saved my iPhone 6S which kept on shutting off.

I haven't noticed this at all. My phone is 4 years old and feels just as fast as always. My previous one I remember thinking how snappy it was after a factory reset when I sold it on. The one before that died. The one before that kept its speed but the battery turned to shit and I couldn't be bothered trying to get it changed. I'm just about to replace this one but it's still in great working order so one of my kids wants it as their first phone.

There was one Android device my wife had that got slower and slower and it was a known issue with the disk.

Android seems to suffer from a phenomenon similar to "Windows creep" where performance decays over time for no reason in particular, even for users who are good stewards of their devices. It's more of an issue for some devices than it is for others for reasons that are unclear.

I used to think this at well, but then I removed all of the useless apps I'd gathered over the years. The improvements were almost instant. Installing apps doesn't have a noticeable impact on general system performance, but install enough of them and you'll find everything mote sluggish than you remember.

My phone feels as fast as the day I bought it, which so far must've been about four years ago now. It came out with Android 9 and is currently running Android 13 through a custom ROM.

Newer devices certainly feel snappier, but the old phone works as well as it ever did, except for the battery carrying almost half of its original capacity. I still have my OnePlus One and I can't say it feels like the phone is slower than when I bought it.

I think the slowness is caused more by the change in perception thsnt be degradation of hardware and the ever growing software bloat. Modern phones software comes with fluid, high resolution, high speed animations and transitions everywhere that don't work well on older devices. Once you turn those off, you'll quickly find that many older devices will work just as well with modern software as they did with their older software.

Bargain bin devices that come out with specs that can't even run the factory firmware are the exception, of course. However, that segment seems to have shrunk significantly since I last looked into buying a phone.

Regarding my own case, it was a Google Nexus 5X. Performaed a factory reset, but the phone is still super-slow.

100% sure that this is not perception. I'm talking about seconds-long delays.

Regarding the acquaintances, I don't remember (or know); I think a couple of them were old Samsung Galaxy S models. Again, factory reset didn't help.

I guess that as parent posted, this problem affects some models more than others. I'm still really curious about the technical cause :)

I believe several generations of Samsung devices have a hardware issue with their flash storage that will make the storage slow down to a crawl before bricking itself. The problem only appeared a few years after release and it doesn't seem to affect every device either. Google and Samsung were most commonly affected if I recall correctly.

My old tablet suffers from the same problem. It's quite frustrating to use because of it, but luckily I'm only planning on using it for postmarketOS and that can boot from the SD card slot.

Other brands didn't have this problem and the problem has since been rectified in the Pixel/Galaxy lines. I suppose some very cheap devices may still be using trash flash storage chips, but it's no longer an issue with Android phones from the past few years.

I have a 9 year old phone (Galaxy Note 4, yay for removable batteries!) as a daily driver, now on LineageOS and while it is true that removing the bloat will help a lot, it is very clear that the slowdown is real.

Among the most noticeable worst offenders is Google Maps, but many apps get slower update after update while not offering much more than cosmetic changes. Websites too, many apps are just websites bundled with a browser anyways. Apps that didn't receive updates for many years are as snappy as they ever were.

I had a Samsung Galaxy S2 and a Nexus 10 which both suffered from flash related problems making them incredibly slow. Samsung never fixed that nor was there ever a recall.

I also owned a HTC One M7 which worked well for a very long time but it also got slow even though there were no hardware problems. The M7 worked just as good from day one if I factory reset it, it only becomes slow again once all the apps are updated. What I think is happening here is that apps move to the newer Android API but keep compatibility with older Android versions through compatibility layers, and they compound so once the entire compatibility layer stack becomes "too thick" the CPU gets bogged down and the whole thing becomes slow...

I finally made the switch last year, but I used a moto G (rather popular model, at least in Europe: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ ) for some 6 years.

It did slow down at one point, but it came back to life after installing lineageos, so now I blame bloat for the slow down phones suffer from.

The bottleneck on the Asus phone I replaced recently and I had since 2017 or so (before that I had T-Mobile G1 for maybe 8 years) was the glass - it breaks really easily because there is no plastic protection along the edges as it used to be on older phones.

How old? I'm still using two LG V20's from 2016 and don't experience issues.

> CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating

I might be wrong, but AFAIK this is not a thing within the usual timescales.

It can't be excluded. I remember a friend of mine overclocking his CPU (around 20 years ago!), and notificing that the maximum clock they could achieve, would decrease over time.

I guess that when put under thermal stress (which may be the case for some phone, for whatever reason) may actually have a measurable effect.

It's probably due to old battery causing imperfect thermal control then extreme throttling. Phones are not really well tested on aged batteries since it's hard to artificially make such one that fits well to real world scenario, and manufacturers also don't have good incentives to do so.

One contributor is that most models get a mid life major Android version update after 2 ish years and those don't work as well as the launch versions. It's unlikely to be hardware problems you suggest. Flash ftl slowdown due to filling up or fragmentation from use might contribute though.

There are some jank debugging tools on Android, would be interesting to see what they report on a fresh vs slowness afflicted device.