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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

The flipside of this is that developers are forced to support versions of their apps that are compatible with previous operating systems. That's bad for developers, but good for consumers.

iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user. They're so persistent that inevitably most people will accept the new update - and even if you're stubborn like me, eventually your apps will no longer be supported under the newer OS's, and you are forced to update to keep using them. The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you're perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS's. It's good that Android users can at least avoid this particular kind of planned obsolescence

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> iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user.

And we have the monster that was Windows XP because of users thinking "updates" are "forced" down throats.

iOS is correctly celebrated for having such a high adoption of the "latest and greatest", and certainly hasn't become the demon that is the unpatched Android landscape.

So thankfully, from NetSec to the end user, it's a fantastic thing that iOS keeps devices more up to date than android.

I agree, but it is true that newer updates dramatically slow down older hardware.

Backup, wipe, and reinstall.

In some cases it doesn't help. E.g. iOS 7 update for iPad2, iPhone 4/4S etc.

iOS 7 was pretty rough on anything slower than an iPhone 5

I thought this had been tested recently and shown not true? A psychological illusion or something? I’ve never noticed any significant, let alone dramatic, speed change on any given device from iOS 3 on the original iPad onwards.

Apps that represent light websites like Google and Facebook are now 300mb+. With such memory hogging updates, few people with older phones are going to update.

Size is not speed.

True, but...

Older hardware has older chips (and possibly slower memory) so... a larger size alone would still likely have an actual processing speed impact, no? The newer OS and app versions are developed with chip/memory speed "XYZ" in mind, and that's the target they aim for. That the OS does run on older hardware is great, but if your memory size goes up 2-3 times for apps, I can not imagine that there's 0 speed impact.

Aren't you confusing apps and the OS here?

Apps are definitely bigger and slower, but that's separate from whether the OS is faster or slower.

Anecdotally (and I agree) iOS 11 is slower than 10 for many of the same tasks -- things like switching apps, opening the camera, opening the keyboard.

They tested the performance of the hardware (CPU, GPU, etc), not of the APIs or updated apps. So the CPU and GPU of my iPhone 6 are just as fast as when they were released. But I can guarantee you that the camera app as well as a lot of third party apps aren't as fast as they were when I bought the phone.

I thought it was a myth too, but iOS 11 is undeniably much slower for me. And I don't understand why, as it doesn't seem like it adds many features. There's a new filesystem, but shouldn't that be faster, not slower?

That's bad for developers, but good for consumers.

Is it? I'm a developer --- and a consumer, as are most --- and have always kept to the principle of as much compatibility as possible, mostly by not gorging on new features for the sake of new features, and a "do what you can with what you have" approach. To me, spending a little extra effort to get much more compatibility is well worth it, since I've been on "the other side" and know the horrible experience of not being able to use something just because the developer didn't bother to think about anything but the "new and shiny"; that seems to be something a lot of developers completely ignore or even oppose.

The QA effort to support 3-4 of the most recent OS’s isn’t “a little extra effort.” It can get pretty expensive, too, since you may have to have devices for all supported OS versions and possibly idioms (e.g. iPhone, iPad).

If only Android devs only had to think about 3-4 of the most recent OSes...

There are outliers in either direction, but these days the minimum supported version tends to be either API Level 19 if you're conservative, with a stead shift towards ... API Level 21. For reference, Oreo is API Level 26.

As a developer of a long-lived popular app I've been pretty agressive at cutting off older OS versions from updates (min sdk 21 right now, considering 23). But the Play Store lets you keep serving up an old version of your app for those older devices. So before I cut off an old OS version I make sure to have a solid bug free release that I can serve them for a few years until eventually my backend API server is forced to break backward compatibility at which point I pull it from the app store and serve up an I'm sorry message for anyone trying to run that old version, about 3 years old at this point.

Making it easier for users to run software with unpatched vulnerabilities, even accounting for some extra slowness, isn’t a good thing..

That "isn't a good thing" is paired against another "isn't a good thing": forcing people along an (expensive, disruptive, often utility-losing) upgrade path simply to drive revenue goals.

Perhaps we might look at this as a set of goals:

1. Users shouldn't run software with unpathed vulnerabilitities.

2. Users shouldn't have to discard devices after a small number of years (1-3, from date of purchase, in many cases).

3. Hardware, OS, and software vendors should have a functioning ecosystem in which they can operate profitably.

Unfortunately, the economics of hardware + information goods with an ongoing support liability but a one-time purchase point are pretty much pathological. This isn't a new problem. It's one that AT&T and IBM solved, in the 1930s and earlier, by leasing rather than selling hardware. IBM has continued that model through the present, for its enterprise computing hardware. There are few general-public devices that fall under this category, though.

I think a fundamental problem here is that most information and knowledge goods don't fit well into an economic framework which is based on the assumption of scarcity. Of course you can artificially add scarcity with DRM tech, patent law etc. But what mostly happens in practice is that you need to come up with some kind of indirect business model. Like e.g. Google, developing a lot of great tech, but ultimately being a broker of user attention and data.

This disconnect between business model and products leads to a lot of unaligned incentives between makers and users of product. That's the innocent looking root of evilness - no bad people required.

Pretty much, yes.

Market economics works for commodities.

For wages, it tends to subsistence levels.

For public goods (including information) it under-provisions.

For rents (fixed-quantity goods or services, including both land and attention), this tends to absorb surplus valley.

For assets and risk-based elements, I'm still sorting out the dynamics, though they also appear to be poor.

There's various precedent for much of this:

* Adam Smith's classifications of types of goods: commodities, wages, stock (capital), rents, assets (gold and silver), interest, and "expenses of the sovereign" (public goods).

* Various economic-sector classifications. Alexandre Dumas, Simon Kuznets, Clark, and Beniger come up with 3-5 elements, generally: extractive/sourcing, manufacture & construction, transport and distribution, risk and finance (especially FIRE), governance and information. I'm finding these fascinating.

* Industrial classifications including SIC, NAICS, and ISIC.

* A classification of technological methods I've been looking at for a few years, including materials, networks, information, control, knowledge, and power transmission & transformation.

But yes: inoformation and markets play poorly. Software and systems incorporate both information and risk elements. (And probably others.)

Then manufacturers should fix that problem. The reason people don't like security updates, is that they are tied to feature updates. Most people don't like the new feature updates, and would happily take just the security updates. If users were given that option, I'm betting that a lot of the push-back to updates would drop fast.

I bet most people find digital security too abstract to understand why it’s important, and not bother with updates that didn’t include shiny new features.

Also, Generic Phones Inc. don’t see any money in pushing out pure security features — only big players get that benefit, because it’s a type of quality thats a tragedy of the commons thing.

I’d change the laws by international treaty to require security patches for all devices for whatever the 2σ lifetime is. If the manufacturers don’t want to do it themselves, then an open source requirements and a sales tax to fund hiring developers to fix it.

I'm arguing the opposite: I think people would update if updates didn't break their shit. I have no statistics on this, and would gladly welcome some, but IME people heavily complain that "the last update broke my $x, so I don't want to update again".

If we had 2 different channels of updates: security and feature, then this wouldn't be an issue.

I completely agree with you about the laws and open-sourcing.

Manufacturers have no incentive now to do so.

They absolutely do. Android is known to be a security nightmare. That means a bad reputation, which also means less sales. I hate Apple and their products, but if someone said that they got an iPhone because it's more secure than Android, I can't really argue that they are wrong.

Exactly that!

It may be true that "normal" users don't understand security or take it seriously enough, but in my opinion just blaming them isn't fair.

Imagine your car being painted in new colors and handles in the cockpit being re-arranged in unpredictable ways every time you have it serviced.

That's basically what Software updates often do to users.

We constantly force users to re-learn how to use a piece of Software, very often without good enough reason. Additionally updates at some point force them to buy newer hardware, even though they probably neither wished for the changes in the Software nor for new hardware.

That's why I totally understand casual PC users who're not gonna stop using Windows XP as long as it lets them do what they use their PC for.

In my opinion commercial software should be regulated to either provide security updates (distinct from feature updates) or be open sourced.

>The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you're perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS's. It's good that Android users can at least avoid this particular kind of planned obsolescence

I have seen this first hand with my 4S. The updates slowed down my phone, which I was perfectly happy with. Unfortunately, Apple blocks you from restoring your phone's OS back to when it worked great. Heh, and then I bought the 6S, so I suppose Apple got my money anyway.

> That's bad for developers, but good for consumers.

It is bad for consumers as well, since you only have so much time.

Apple has allowed you to download the last compatible version for years - that ability goes as far back as at least iOS 5 that came out in 2012.

Sure, but will (networked) apps still work? Is it possible to download apps for previous versions still? If you can revert OS but can't run netflix/facebook/whatever then it's not very useful.

Yes. I have a first generation iPad (running iOS 5) that I rediscovered when I moved. I reset it because I forgot the password. Hulu, Netflix, Crackle, theCW, Plex, Google Drive, CBS (?), and Spotify still work.

Apple's productivity apps (Pages,Numbers, and Keynote) also still work and sync with iCloud.

On the other hand, I also rediscovered an old first generation iPod Touch (iOS 3). Nothing that requires network access except for the built in apps still works.

This[0] could give your iPod Touch a slight kick in the butt, and this[1] for your iPad, if you feel inclined to keep using them.

[0]http://www.whited00r.com/index?lang=en

[1]http://www.grayd00r.com

That's really cool. I'm going to definitely try it on my old iPod Touch.

You can to a degree. You’re able to install the last compatible version of an app.

No it doesn't. It only allows you to do that for an app you already installed in the past.

If you want to install an app for the first time, where the current version is incompatible with your OS, you can't.

Believe me, I've tried.

There is an work around, download it via iTunes. You don't have to sync via iTunes to do it just use the same account. Apple still makes the previous version of iTunes that allowed you to download apps available to download.

> The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you're perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS's.

This is a truism and from my experience it rings false. I ran an iPhone 5 for four years without feeling degraded.

FWIW, as background, I'm an ex-overclocking PC enthusiast and I consider myself very sensitive to any sorts of performance lag.

Side note: "truism" means "A statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting."

Or something that’s very obvious to be self-evidently true.

But, he might have thought of the complaint as so typical it has become a saying, and a truism by argumentum ad populum, but in his eyes false. Besides, most truisms are true only until they are not (a truism example). The Sun is hot. One day it won’t even be (exist).

It's less true on iPhones but even there it starts happening after a few years. On Android, it's terrible.

But yeah, android was a total resource hog when it got started because of Java, and it's gotten worse and worse.

> iPhones shove updates down your throats as a user

It doesn't, you don't have to update iOS. You can keep an older version. The same with Android. The only difference is that AppStore won't serve you older app-versions that would still work for your iOS version, after some time. While PlayStore still serves you much older app-versions.

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