This happened on all android devices I’ve owned. Once they turn about 3 years old, they start slowing down out of a sudden. Yes, software gets heavier, you need more processing power, etc. But it happens out of a sudden.
I dug out an old lebovo tablet, about 6 years old. It ran surprisingly quickly. As soon as I turned the WiFi on to install the app I needed, things slowed down to the point where the device was barely usable. I somehow installed it. The app didn’t require internet access so it was fine. Battery life was still amazing, about 5 days of casual use (internet access drains a lot of battery on this fella).
I thought it was a one time thing. Until I was handed another old Alcatel tablet that was ditched due to slowdown after 3 years. Same thing, no internet access leads to a snappy phone. Once you turn the WiFi on, boom slowdown.
I see the same thing happening to my Nokia 3.4 phone (now HMD Global, made in China). I don’t think the architecture allows for swapping the os to a degoogled one everyone is raving about. The reparibility of this phone is near zero so once it goes bust, it’s really hard to open it as well. I obviously don’t need a brick with no internet access (otherwise I would just carry a dumb phone).
Also once this buddy dies or becomes unusable, is there a brand you would recommend. I’m so done with Nokia and Samsung.
Google isn’t intentionally slowing your phone
Neither was Apple.
Yes they did, that was objectively true and had a big lawsuit about it, and Apple even admitted as such
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-113-million-lawsuit-slowing-down-iphones-2020-11
I know this is going against the circlejerk but that’s not even the same thing. This was specifically done because their batteries were shutting off as their health declined. It is something that ideally should have been off by default, but it isn’t “apple slowing you down to get a new phone” because the issue would go away with a new battery.
And in my experience it helped, previous phones from Apple, Samsung, and HTC got squirrelly around 10-15% after 2-3 years of use.
With the throttling they implemented (to prevent batteries shutting off) I made it to just above 1000 charge cycles on my current phone. Still was only unstable around 4-6% battery with 81% battery life.
Sarcasm was missed apparently.
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I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how much a new battery boosts performance. I don’t quite understand why this is the case. I would think that at full power you’d get full performance even with a battery degraded to 70-80%. What exactly is going on with bad batteries?
Sadly best I have are posts by people claiming to have worked for HMD Global, talking about planned obsolescence by slowing down the phones intentionally. While I’m not really sure Google is doing it too, the experiments with old wiped android devices seem to point that way.
I’d be willing to at least consider that for other companies, but not Google. As far as I know, they still make more money from advertising than selling hardware. Pretty sure they’re just selling the hardware as a vehicle to transport more data.
So there’s no real motivation for them to risk compromising the PR on doing something like this - especially after just hearing that they’ve extended updates for Chromebooks to 10 years.
Those are just my thoughts on it.
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When you connect to the internet all those eonderful background processes can phone home and send data and be commanded to collectmore. You will find that phones running LineageOS or GrapheneOS dont suffer from this as long as no gapps are active.
I picked my current and previous phones from the supported device list of lineageOS. Always run a non-stock recovery, kernel, rom and google-apps package. Even my now ancient galaxy s5 is still running fine. (even if nowhere near as capable as my newer devices)
I’ll try that. Thanks! Already bricked another broken Nokia by not making a recovery when it wasn’t even supported 🙃
More like app you installed requires more and more cpu or ram.
That happened after a wipe of the device. It can’t be the app.
If you wipe the device and didn’t turn Wifi on, you have the old versions of all factory installed apps. Once you turn on WiFi, all of them will update.
Not sure about android,iPhone user here. Speaking from experience, same app will behave differently with different version. If always keep the app to latest version, usually will reach a point where it becomes sluggish
Is it possible that connecting to WiFi triggers app updates in the background? Those can be somewhat intensive especially when batched.
Additionally, the Google Play Store no longer notifies when app updates occur, so this process is a little more opaque than it used to be.
Unlock the bootloader, root the device, install a custom recovery and then a custom rom. You can find all of that at xdadeveloprs.com. I don’t think they slow things down. My 4 year old galaxy note 20 ultra is still working flawlessly. Planning on buying another one after this one goes.
You can debloat the devices, removing all the shit from Google and the devices manufacture.
I recently got a Lenovo tablet from 2017, and once I removed all the shit software, including Google’s, it is quite useable.
Fairphone
