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.