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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I don't buy it. I've been programming for more than 20 years, and I'm pretty sure people were making the same complaints 20 years ago that this article and you are making now.

For some software, performance is important. For others, it isn't. Some developers are good, at least at making performant software, some are worse. That's always been true and will probably always be true.

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Still, software is slowing down. Anecdotal example: my phone. It used to run fine at the beginning then now a few years later everything is slow: Google maps, YouTube, Signal, the pin-code screen… I barely have installed any apps, the only thing that changed is the number of messages I have and the updates.

Perhaps we could justify it with new features at least? Perhaps my phone is slower now because the things in there are so much more useful now? Well, no. I got maybe a couple cosmetic changes, but functionality is exactly the same. My phone got slower for no benefit.

Well, it may be just planned obsolescence, or a system-wide bug. Chances are it would be mostly as snappy as new, if you were to reinstall it and start anew, for example. In my opinion the problematic layer is usually the highest one, the kernel/low-level OS layer doesn’t have too many performance problems.

If you’ve updated your phone’s OS since then, you now have additional services running in the background. Things like on-device face detection for photos, “suggest apps” functionality, and others.

Perhaps, but I still get zero benefit from any of those.

Indeed. Personally I think that this kind of “helpful service bloat” is part of how companies are getting away with slowing phones down over time.

Apple for example barely mentions the fact that these services are running, and certainly does not give you any way to turn them off.

My phone is about 6 years old. It's not noticeably slower than when I got it and it's running a lot more in the background than it used to.

My original SE is definitely slower.

But the weather app now has lightning animations when there's a thunderstorm! Innovation!

It's not even a good vs bad dev issue most of the time, I can imagine lots of devs at Rockstar who hate working there and are under strict deadlines from managers so they just make it work while they leetcode and apply to faang for better salaries where they'll "finally" optimize things, etc.

There's a big difference between latency vs throughput.

We had lots of 'free' improvements in throughput. But latency still requires careful attention.

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