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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting; I still use a Nexus 7 (2012) as my main mobile device. It's occasionally frustratingly slow, but I haven't found almost anything that wouldn't actually run on it. Is the iOS ecosystem worse in that regard, or was the iPad even older?

I agree with the Google Apps thing, though; my employer gave me a new but cheap phone with just 4GB of internal storage, and I'm always having to cleanup so I can install anything new. And an SD card barely helps, lots of stuff simply can't be moved.

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I don't remember how old the iPad was and I no longer have it. But it was old enough that support had been discontinued for its os and I was having trouble finding ways around that. Perhaps someone more technical could have found a solution. I did ask around, but to no avail.

Thanks. Experiences like yours are why I'm always wary of the pushes to make access to services exclusively online. They're usually an attempt to cut budgets by throwing the people who need it more under the bus.

A lot of libraries don't have the latest software. Internet access is often limited to 2 or 3 hours per day on public computers. Public computers frequently do not allow for even temporarily saving images or other files to the desktop, which seriously limits what you can do in them.

I love the internet. It makes my life vastly more workable. But it makes me crazy that there is so little effort to keep the bar for entry low in terms of money and technical savvy.

Why does my cheap phone need so many apps that I don't use, that cannot be disabled and that promptly update again after I delete all the data off of them, forcing me to delete the same data repeatedly? Is this really necessary? Come on.

Some tips, just in case they help. When disabling apps, you can generally ignore the warning that other apps may break. Do not disable Google play services, though. Also, go into the account settings and make sure sync is turned off for everything, you can sync manually when needed. Finally, disable auto-update in the play store. Google apps update frequently but will generally continue to work for quite a while if you refuse those updates.

I had no idea I could turn off auto update in the app store. I couldn't find a way to do it on my phone, so I thought it could not be done. That alone should make this more manageable.

Thank you.

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