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Comment by sputr | Hacker News Reader

There is also another factor that may influence this statistic: most android phones in the general population are slow as hell. While in IT, especially in mobile development, phones are fast-ish. Developers keep adding features (OS as well as app) when they should be doing performance optimization.

I have a 1 year old, low/mid range phone I bought because I just didn't have the cash for a flagship. I have only the "most common" apps installed. Mobile web is unusable. Opening chrome takes 2 minutes, doing the actual search a minute more, rendering the site ... well, let's just say I have JS turned off. Unless I don't have access to the internet some other way and it's really crucial, I'm just not going to bother.

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I used to work at a place that gave everyone 2 machines for development: Their regular desktop, and a 5 year old machine, with a throttled internet connection. The programs had to be run on both. I wish more companies would do this.

Especially in mobile. Sure, your site loads fast when your in a major downtown area, but try using your 30 different java-scripts when your in Nowheresville Alabama

This is a very good idea. Might as well just use a VM and throttle that as a test too.

I was recently basically forced to get a new phone because my Galaxy Note 3 had become virtually unusable from software updates over the past few years. Common tasks would freeze the phone for seconds at a time. All animations were laggy. It was as if it was running on 10-15 year old hardware, not 2 year old hardware.

Just to be clear, I've experienced similar degradation with Apple products as well (specifically an older iPad), but never as severe as with the Note 3. My old iPad is still definitely useable; it's just not as smooth as it once was. The phone on the other hand had just become complete junk.

Meanwhile my girlfriend's Nexus 5 phone has been on a roller coaster of battery life changes. Not too long ago, an update caused her battery life to drain to 0 in roughly half a day of light usage. Then it was fixed. Then it was ruined again in the update to Marshmallow. She's going to have to get a new phone as well because hers too has become nearly unusable.

Obsolescence as a Service! It can even be A-B tested to optimize the migration to new phones.

Did you consider replacing the battery? (beside the battery not aging very well, I'm still happy with the N5 performance).

I agree. I damaged the charging port on my N5 and while it usually works, it occasionally doesn't and I didn't feel like depending on it. Still, I kept it around when I bought a Moto X last year and still fire it up occasionally and use it as a backup phone. I'm always surprised when I fire it up and (once it finishes syncing all of my email and stuff) it still runs great. I actually miss how the display is bonded to the glass so that there's just a little less of that barely perceived disconnect between my finger and the screen. Didn't think much of it but when I go back to the N5 it's a pleasant surprise. I feel like the last couple of years have seen mobile devices really hit a point where even a $350-400 device can remain useful for several years. Anything I own that's older (iPad2, Galaxy S2) ran like a dog within a couple of years.

Nexus phones are notorious for the rollercoaster of battery life. Before Marshmallow, my N6 would be dying by 5pm with random, low-medium usage. With a Marshmallow build from XDA, I hit 20% at 9pm. It's insane. The battery stats looks roughly similar from either OS though.

This isn't a rebuttal, but there are often (better) alternatives to the firmware that ships with devices, especially if it's a carrier maintained version.

I've used Cyanogenmod on my smart devices for as long as I've been buying them. CM has had sandboxing for apps for a few years now, and I was running 5.1.1 on my S3 months before it was available for my SO's S5 through her carrier. CM13, announced recently, will be built around Marshmallow.

For older devices, you can either try the newest CM versions or go back to earlier stable major releases. And they're all bloatware and CarrierIQ free.

I stayed away from Cyanogenmod because... well, the rule of conservation of hackergy dictates that playing around with rooting my phone would take me away from hacking electronics and constantly reconfiguring Emacs. But at this point I think after I get back from China, if I won't buy a phone here, I'm going to flash my S4 with Cyanogen, praying it will help - the way the phone has been slowing down for the past two years is utterly ridiculous, and I blame it on overheating CPU or something because I just can't believe this shit could be software - neither the system nor the apps I use should ever need that much processing power.

I just replaced my nexus 5 battery, has totally rejuvenated my phone. I can use heavily and it will still have charge at the end of the day.

Fairly easy to do if you buy an opener kit for a few dollars.

It's a hardware problem.

Oh yes. My S4 has been slowing down over the last 2 years to the point I simply don't do things like browsing too much, because they involve spending 30 seconds waiting to switch between apps, etc. Many sites are unusable due to the amount of heavy JS processing they do. I stick to native apps as much as I can and I'm thinking about getting a new phone.

I have a 4 year old phone. Without all of the kernel optimizations, forced removal of Google App and Google Play Services, I wouldn't be able to do anything. My battery lasts 4 days of normal use. Before my changes it couldn't last 10 hours.

So much amateurish bloat. I'm baffled by those engineers.

Don't be baffled. Engineering is driven by business direction, and the creation of an upgrade cycle is beneficial for the entire Android ecosystem.

You are not the customer they want.

This has nothing to do with an upgrade cycle. Optimisation costs engineering time which is quite pricy. So it's an easy way to cut costs.

> You are not the customer they want.

That's true. Then I'd say I just don't like the engineering they are doing.

How did you force remove the Google apps and Google Play Services? Did this require root?

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition that I bought in February, and it lasts nowhere as long as my wife's 2012 iPad3. Such a disappointment. I will sell it, last Android device I buy.

Of course, root, without it I couldn't do a thing.

I have Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 but older edition, battery is still fine, the OS got slow, even on factory reset, so, I decided to root it and runs much faster - pen use was not that great before, now it's perfect.

Note that the act of rooting didn't have anything to do with the speed up, after installing a custom OS with GPU optimizations for drawing graphical elements it worked great.

CyanogenMod is basically a stock Android without any of the Google apps, services or frameworks.

You can always install a very minimal version of the GApps later if you really need them.

Look for a Nano or Pico version. I can't remember which is the smaller of the two, but it basically just comes with Play Store and the Framework to make it work.

At the same time, isn't it nice that you can do these things? Every so often I look for similar projects or hacks to revitalize my old iPad2 but they don't seem to exist. At that point I don't care about warranties or the silly insistence that I can't be trusted to grant superuser privileges on a device I own. But even jailbroken, I've yet to find a way to reliably "slim down" the iPad's set of running processes so it's painful to use even as just a web browsing device.

I just bought a 2015 Moto G (the 8GB/1GB model, to use without a data plan). It works much better than you describe.

Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end?

You can pick up any of a dozen Android phones for $20 at Wal-Mart [1]. That's the low end. $200 is a big expense for most people.

1: http://www.walmart.com/browse/cell-phones/shop-all-no-contra...

Those are all carrier locked, so the actual cost of the phone might be higher than the retail price. I don't think net10 is spending huge dollars making their phones cheap, but I'm sure they spend a bit.

Yes but unfortunately people look at up front costs and not end costs.

$200 to someone living in poverty is more than a month of food, while $20 up front + $40/ month for a baseline limited text and call plan seems far more manageable.

My point was that the value of the hardware may not be reflected in the retail price of the phone, the purchasing psychology doesn't matter there.

It seems that there are lots of ~$100 (or less) phones shipping though, and they are quite a bit less capable than the one I bought.

> Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end?

You get reasonable (unlocked!) Android phones for as little as $100, and entry-level ones for a lot less. Low end is really, really low nowadays.

Edit: The cheapest I could find: http://www.alcatelonetouch.com/global-en/products/detail?mod... Sells for less than 50€ unlocked.

If you don't mind sharing, what kind of phone is it and how much did you pay? I have a 1st gen Moto X which is now over two years old and the tasks you mention feel pretty much instantaneous. I know that the Moto X was a high end phone when it came out but I bought it used last summer for $100 and I imagine that the specs were comparable to inexpensive new phones at the time.

It's a Samsung GT-I8260. I got it on contract (I was really low on cash and with a broken phone) and it was marked at 160€. It's not unlocked and not rooted. Cynogenmod is not supported for the device (as far as I know).

What phone? I have a Nexus 4 running Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop). It's three years old and still works just fine. Battery life has decreased a bit as expected. It has some quirks but overall performance is on par with when it was new.

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