Apple and Samsung fined for deliberately slowing down phones
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A bit of a scary precedent. The 5m fine on Apple for intentionally reducing resource usage to such a large extent without notification seems kinda reasonable. But the 5m fine for both Apple and Samsung for their updates causing slowdown on older devices is a different issue.
If I were a company fearing that suggesting an OS upgrade for an older phone would cause slowdown on that older phone, I am now incentivized to not suggest that update. We might want companies to support old OSs forever or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever. But short of legislating that specifically, all this does is make old phones even more of a liability than they already were.
The problem with (1) is now you've completely stagnated the market, and if your competitors choose either of the other options you're left lagging behind and you lose sales.
The problem with (2) is now customers of older phones will be upset that they didn't get the full upgrade for reasons they don't understand. The iPhone 4S and Siri or the iPhone X and Animoji show the reaction you should expect.
The problem with (3) is now you have planned obsolescence and old phones just become throw-away leading to an ecological disaster.
None of these are good options.
A checkbox isn't that hard.
A naive assumption. In fact, each checkbox exponentially increases the number of possible runtime environments you have to maintain and test.
"Installing this update will give you access to feature X, but will slow down your phone."
For comparison, my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S6 forces me to install updates, which I hate. Wasn't my choice to get this particular phone, wouldn't do it again.
This will mean: almost never updates at all.
Well, I have to admit: my mother will be happy about it.
Says who, the government? We are talking about court-imposed fines here, not consumer wishes. Do we want a literal slow-software police?
That obvious answer is no, but as I think back on how many times I've been frustrated by some poorly performing piece of shit application over the past year, it's starting to not seem so bad of a solution.
Yes please!
This court case shows that we kinda now already have one.
The phones from 5 years ago already had amazing processors with billions of cycles per second. They can probably do nearly everything.
But you know us software engineers: "make it faster till it runs wells on my test kit, then oh well ship it!"
I think this ruling is a nudge into a better way. Yes deplay updates for more than 2 years, but don't stop optimizing new stuff when the latest phone can run it pretty well - keep optimizing until devices from the last 5 years run it very well.
That's patently wrong. The point of the fine was not that the phones were noticeably slower after the upgrade. The point of the fine was that the slowness was motivated as a way of inducing forced obsolescence. The manufacturers forced the updates with no rollback mechanism to render phones unusable and thus force their users to purchase replacements. If users could roll back the changes then the manufacturers wouldnt be fined.
Also, I remember the calculator app being unreliable due to animations: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/24/ios-11-calculator-anima...
Is this not a legitimate problem?
† The google feed seems to have a consistent lag upon switching to it from the home screen (double tap on the multitasking button is normal) that the animations hide. It loads somewhere around 150ms slower than most applications, even taking longer than the first launch for unused apps.
It's a bit slow on loading, but after that it's really fast !
And every Reddit client ever, or Reddit in general. Shameless amount of cookies and a horribly bloated UI just to do the same thing they were doing 10 years ago with double the client resource usage.
The amazing/sad thing is reddit with other clients can be blazingly fast. I just tried redreader from the f-droid store (android open source store) and using it feels like the content is loaded locally.
It's a lot easier to "not write slow software" if you're not constrained by power limitations. Apple went to all the trouble of switching CPU architectures just to get on a better side of that problem.
I don't see how planned obsolescence via missing bells and whistles present in new phones is any worse than planned obsolescence via all functionality getting slower.
Written on my iPhone 5S (2013) running iOS 8 (2014) - it is still a phone and is just as fast as it was in 2014. Is that planned obsolescence?
Samsung could trivially provide security updates on old version as Google does most of the heavy-lifting so they have no excuse for recommending upgrades on older, slower phones. Apple doesn't presently have a mechanism for this on iOS, to my knowledge.
Only if they use online services that are taken down; not all apps are like this. Even if they are, it is still a better scenario than throwing the entire phone away because it's unusably slow or unsafe to use due to lack of security fixes.
No. But it probably has known unpatched vulnerabilities, and you're putting yourself and people around you in danger of a security hack.
It's unfortunate that I can't get security patches. I'm not willing to update to iOS 76 to get the fixes because I don't want to run code that is tested on an A12 on my 5 year old phone, and I don't want to buy a new phone because this one works fine and isn't larger than my hands.
I believe the problem was that the updates made existing functionality slower. e.g. the same Facebook app you had before the update scrolls slower afterwards or the old launcher is replaced with one that's more jittery, without letting you use the old one.
Adding new features is fine, just don't break the old ones.
And in any case: they're free not to offer feature upgrades to old phones; I just doubt that's a wise choice in the market. If they really can't provide a few updates and reasonable performance - good riddance, their successors surely will.
"this update will harm performance but improves security and gives access to new features; your choice" (imagined release note on update clickthrough)
?
The new features being talked about are ones that make an old phone slower. I owned an iPhone 5s and updated to the latest iOS version for 4 years and never noticed any slowness. So, basically, (2) means I would miss out on new features because other people complain about slowness that I don't notice.
That's not what's at issue here though. The update was literally along the lines of "if (old phone) then { set_cpu_throttle_threshold(lower); }".
Now the intentions were good, even if paternalistic in that the newer features were more demanding on older devices and throttling in theory was supposed to provide a better user experience with the device under high demand--freezing for 5s instead of crashing and rebooting. But still it was literally a patch to make old devices run slower, which regardless of intention should not be allowed.
If that's true, it reduces my fear. I know that's true wrt Apple's batteries. But what I read for the OS updates is that they suggested/shipped newer software they knew would degrade the performance as opposed to intentionally degrading it.
As for intentions, while they may have been good (I think it's just easier maintenance to keep one running stable branch), if they were that consumer friendly they would have been more open to the user about the harms of upgrading.
Apple obviously was not intending to harm users here (I don't know the Samsung case well enough to comment), they absolutely messed up the messaging by not making a notice about their work-around front-and-center, but I disagree with the precedent that this fine is setting.
The crashes which were being avoided would only have happened on bad batteries. But the throttling happened in all instances, bad battery or not.
It obviously wasn't an "iOS 12 gimps the iPhone 7" issue - I mean, Apple sells new iPhone 7 phones with iOS 12 on them right now.
Newer iOS updates allow you to disable the CPU throttle. It turns out that "high demand" scenarios that cause the phone to crash can be triggered by mundane actions like taking photos.
If you disallow throttling by law, old devices will just crash all the time.
This was what Apple apologists said when this issue first came to light, but hasn't Apple already shot its own excuse in the foot? iOS 11.3/12.0 came out, removing the throttles, and I haven't seen anything about a rash of phones all constantly shutting off now.
AFAICT, this switch won't affect throttling in other cases, such as near/sub-freezing temperatures.
* this is a pretty complex issue; "throttling" isn't even a great term once you actually start to understand how the power management works
There is two parts to consider I think:
- iOS updates are not reversible (technically it can be done, but for lambda users it's a lost cause).
- Apple is very aggressive towards making users upgrade, nagging indefinitely if there is any available newer version
So, users are very aggressively pushed towards the newer version, can't go back, but their phone becomes less useable, for new features they might not care about. As it is now, not offering the major update to old phones will be a grace in a number of cases.
It would still be nice if users wanting to upgrade can have a path forward, understanding the trade-offs. But users should be less complaining if their device keeps working basically the same way as when they bought it years ago.
The precedent is neither scary nor controversial. The European law says a device should keep functioning for a reasonable amount of time. A car completely breaking apart after 25 months is not normal. A smartphone being insecure is not normal either. Especially not considering how much personal data these contain.
My car costs multiple tens of thousands of euro and yet it's still only 24 months (people actually tried this one at a court, failed).
If you bought your Samsung phone in the EU, you will get the 24 month warranty automatically from all EU-native suppliers. Of course if you ship it from somewhere else like the US or Asia, it's very different. If it's from EU, send it in as non-functional.
There are many things that are counter-productive in the EU, this one is probably one of the smallest ones.
Here's a lawyer's take on it [1]. Although I'm not sure if its EU specific or NL specific. According to [2] [3] [4] there are some differences between NL and EU on this account. They specifically mention the car example in those sources, btw.
[1] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2018/09/27/honderden-klachten-ove...
[2] http://www.conformiteit.nl/conformiteit-conformiteitbeginsel...
I'd bought an iPad pro just a few months before, and suddenly I couldn't use apps I require (no updates available).
Instead of downgrading to the new-and-busted-iOS version I just sold the friggin iPad (not "fit for purpose") and went back to my ancient iPad (original model). Doesn't get used for browsing the net obviously, but at least that model still works.
But devices can never work the same as when they were purchased for two reasons.
1) Running an older OS with the originally shipped apps means that you are exposed to widely known exploits which weren't known when the device was purchased. You may counter that we could mandate security updates for older OSs for x years, but this raises all sorts of practical issues determining what bugs are serious enough for backports, and what effect fixing a security issue has on performance.
2) Third parties don't all have the resources or incentives to support older OSs, and app compatibility or usability is just as likely to drive people to upgrade as a slightly slower phone. This would be a big problem for smaller dev shops, and Apple largely solves it through its smooth but overbearing upgrade process, but even large and successful companies want to minimize the costs of supporting older OSs. MS Office apps for instance require iOS 11 and up. So your phone used to run an older version of Word ok, but 3 years after not upgrading the OS, it no longer does, or it is no longer compatible with MSs upgraded cloud services, or you restore but MS has stopped making a compatible version available on the App Store due to technical and security debt.
What sort of regulatory apparatus is going to adjudicate these issues, and wouldn't uncertainty around it place shackles on innovation?
Regardless, the relatively small fines levied are already behind the curve, and market forces have already pushed Apple to addressing the issue. iOS 12 had a large focus on speeding up older devices, and my soon-to-be 6 year old iPhone 5S seems to run nearly as well as it ever has. Lisa Jackson had a prominent spot during the last keynote declaring that Apple was focusing on increasing device longevity [1] . OS updates are the key to this.
I want to be clear that this is a lost cause for effectively everyone: I'm saurik, and, even with access to people like geohot and iH8Sn0w, if you give me a phone that is running a later version of the operating system and ask to downgrade, I'm going to say you need to lobby your congressperson to force Apple to allow that... the only thing that even sort of works is if you had a buggy version of the firmware to start with and did some prep work you can sometimes manage to get a downgrade to work if the firmware you upgrade to (or the bootloader itself) is also buggy... it isn't like it is "just really hard to do because it requires manual labor": it is only possible due to mistakes in Apple's attempts to make sure it can't be done.
You're leaving out the easy solution though - allow users to "downgrade"! The reason this is such a huge issue isn't that they're giving customers the option to upgrade, it's that they refuse to let you go back if you find out the new version is slow. Additionally, when they break functionality on the old version (looking at you facetime) they need to fix it without forcing you to upgrade to a whole new release. (Issue a patch for JUST THAT).
It also means you lose security updates, and generally hold your platform back. Part of what makes iOS so much better to develop for is the general availability of modern APIs to most of the user base. If you increase those on older versions, then you hold back development of the platform as a whole.
iOS 12 was a major step forward in performance and battery consumption. Moves like that — making it a company priority - are a better way forward than allowing people to go backward.
This isn't a technology or a QA problem, it's vendors refusing to acknowledge that customers own their devices.
It sounds like a terrible user experience.
If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA).
I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
>So you as a user are going to take a backup of os version N, then upgrade to N+1, live on it for a long time, then both want to pay/keep the storage costs of N AND potentially months later downgrade and lose all new data to go back to N?
You realize Apple already does this, right? Backups go to your laptop if you have itunes installed and icloud by default unless you tell it jnot to.
>It sounds like a terrible user experience.
I've literally never heard anyone complain about the experience.
>If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA).
What are you talking about? Have you actually used a modern smartphone? When I restore, everything that was in the cloud resyncs. Everything that was local is still local. if my iphone were to blow up tomorrow, and I were to do a restore, it would be no different than a downgrade.
>I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
Ahh, right, so they should be designing their OS for 4 year old hardware? Or maybe they should just allow users to downgrade, which would require almost 0 effort on their part.
If you restore from a months old backup, then you’ve lost months worth of data. That’s not a great experience if you can’t backup before downgrading, and super hard to explain to the user why. What you may or may not have “heard” is not a good sample size for decision making.
Just because your phone syncs to the cloud doesn’t mean the way that your data is stored is somehow immutable. It’s extremely common to have various “versions” of people’s data (schemas, most likely) that get migrated once all of a users devices have gone into a new version. This was public in a recent version of notes which said new features would only become available once all of one’s Macs were on High Sierra and all iOS devices were on 11. Restoring on a recent version post-migration IS different than a downgrade.
I believe companies should support old hardware, and Apple clearly prioritizes this as well. Moving software forward is important for the whole ecosystem. As I’ve outlined, it is far more than 0 effort to support downgrades.
The original law this is under to intentionally "shorten the life" in order to promote sales is going to have been written for a totally different case. i.e. intentionally having devices be disposable. Right?
If anything, Apple is the opposite. They consistently provide both security and feature updates for devices several years longer than the majority of competitors. You can see this from http://iossupportmatrix.com/ (there are other source) - the majority of the cases you have 5 years of iOS support - 4 years after the initial release. Most competitor devices barely update things after 2 years even for security let alone features.
The cynic in us might assume that's why the spent time intentionally making iOS 12 faster on older devices - I'd like to think they decided to do that anyway. But either way while that is a great, this ruling seems crazy to me.
But you can be pretty sure most Android OEMs just won't bother to provide any updates at the risk of this.
This is of course muddied by the battery-related performance changes, to stop unexpected shutdowns, which were sadly not Apple's finest moment. The fix is good, but not reporting that to the end user originally was probably a mis-step on Apple's part in my view. And ideally that change might have been added before the next major version iOS update which made it more of a conspiracy than it needed to be - though you can understand how that comes about.
Ugh.
So everything stays the same as before? :)
Without our complaints they would have never done what they did with the last update (which is great)
And nothing to do with "planned obselesence"
Was that a mis-step and/or defect in those devices? Perhaps. But it's clearly not planned obselesence.
Honestly I'm fine if you want to chase them for the battery issue specifically but I think selling it as a general attempt at planned obselesence is complete crap.
The reasons behind it or other efforts the company make to improve older models is irrelevent to the case since the law deals with incidents, otherwise any nefarious action can be excused with good intentions.
These updates often contain security fixes. You risk by not updating on time.
Maybe they ought to unbundle security fixes from feature-upgrades. It's not a technical hurdle, it's a cultural one.
On the technical side, release branches have been existed since forever - Microsoft has been doing this for decades instead of forcing upgrades to the latest windows/office version.
There are 2 possibilities:
1. Users who want to stay on old versions without access to the newer app store stay. This happens all the time with people who have old iPads they want to hand off to their kids/grandparents/whatever.
2. Apple stops pretending that there are enough new features every year to merit a major version of iOS, and gates updates for newer packages to only users of the newest phone. They already have the capability to do this for iPads, iPhone X, and others.
I think this is a case where Apple has to make a choice between their developers' convenience or their users' UX. I personally think developers should cater to multiple versions just like any other platform (targeting Android APIs, Windows releases, kernel versions).
Apple developers aren't special snowflakes. They can handle what other developers have been doing for as long as programmable computers existed.
Is there a good technical reason why a fix to their crypto library couldn't be backported?
This is exactly what Red Hat does, and Debian stable, and it works.
Red Hat only back-ports packages because they are paid to do so per their support contracts. And even under RHEL, you may have to upgrade to the latest packages (for your OS version) to receive support.
And anyway, if you don't trust your OS vendor to not try to screw you over (planned obsolescence) in major releases, why would you trust them for any update whatsoever? Lack of vendor trust is not something you solve through packaging.
Speak for yourself. I expect my devices to be updated and enhanced by new features, which don't require new hardware. If that requirement comes with slight and reasonable performance penalties I'm fine with it.
Nice law.
I'm not sure about that. Consumers can easily tell which phone is less expensive, which one has more storage, etc. It is much harder to know, much less decide based on, which ones will last a long time. Especially since by the time we can confidently say "these last 5 years", you can't buy that model anymore.
This is a problem with nearly anything more complex than a kitchen knife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R...
The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers.
Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".
While apple is definitely a monopoly in the ios market the phone market as a whole is definitely not an oligopoly
Is a $50,000 phone a realistic alternative to an iPhone?
The whole point of this exercise is to get a phone that is well-supported for longer. Should I really believe that an Android name from a no-name brand is going to have better long-term support? On what would I base that?
The "which is why upgrading takes so long" is a perfect example of an axis upon which consumers, via the market, have no control. If you want the latest version of Android, there's only 2 brands that offer it so far (Google and OnePlus), so you'd better agree with all of the other decisions that one of these two made.
Huh, so this[0] doesn't count? It provides an expected lifespan (80% performance after 500 cycles) and info on how to maintain them
Around the time of iOS 7, Apple started letting older versions of iOS download older version of apps that were compatible. Even today you can take a first gen iPad running iOS 5 and download apps that have since been upgraded but where there is an older version available.
I reset my old iPad 1 about two years ago and redownloaded Netflix, Hulu, Spotify etc. They all still work.
...the length those fanboy go. sigh. Go on defendind the indefensible and gate keeping your so precious superior technical knowledge that the common man is incapable to grasp!
On the other hand, if you tell me that my phone's battery can handle around 7 hours of streaming music, or 12 on standby, I know exactly how what that means for my practical usage habits.
I imagine the average phone user's attitude is somewhat similar to mine.
Also, you simply cannot call yourself "relatively technical" and still belive the greatest lie of "manufacturer estimated battery duration".
I've worked at places that do performance regression tests and there's usually some small threshold that's tolerated (<1% or something, let's say). The cumulative effect of these might be enough to have significant impact.
But another problem is that they're probably doing more target testing on the new designs than the old designs and they might not notice/care enough about the impact of features on old targets' performance. If they're not maintaining independent software branches for the ease of delivering updates, then they risk introducing performance regressions on old targets.
I haven't heard of this happening, which leads me to believe the excuse was bs in the first place.
EDIT: To be clear, I know that iPhones have always been known to unexpectedly shut down. Throttling performance was ostensibly meant to prevent these unexpected shutdowns. My question is whether or not the incidence of unexpected shutdowns increased once Apple lifted the throttle.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-6s-turning-off-a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vne2w/does_anyone_e...
And Apple cut the price of battery replacement from $79 -> $29 in response to it.
Unfortunately I can't check the reddit thread at the moment, as its blocked at work.
EDIT: Reddit thread is also from prior to lifting the throttle.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984234/how-to-iphone-thr...
The throttling prevented sudden spikes in power usage. I dont think it was fundamentally a bad thing. It made your phone useful when it otherwise wouldnt be. A processor operating at 50% speed works a lot better than one that shuts itself off. But Apple probably should have been more clear about it and offered a toggle to turn it off.
Plus the bulk of the internet outrage has moved on through 3 other Apple "-gate" events since then.
>The company later apologised for its actions and reduced the cost of battery replacements. It also added battery health information to iOS and allowed users to turn off the slowing down of the iPhone’s processor.
On the other hand, Apple would be sued over the sudden shutdowns because of the battery degradation, or over the battery degradation because of the cost of battery replacement, or ... etc.
Class action suits are a cost of Apple doing business in giant volumes. They (and every company) are making tradeoffs with their products and I know from my own experience that making tradeoffs is an art and not a exact calculus.
So Apple can deal with the legal actions - they have the money. But of course this is another high barrier of entry from anybody else looking to get into the business.
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power
What is true is that third-party replacements may not work out, I don't know.
- Fined tv journalists for how they managed their airing time every year in different ways, most of the time the decision is based on who's leading the current government
- Wanted to fine WhatsApp\Telegram\Etc because they were "free to use" despite the mobile carriers were STILL charging for goddamn TXTs
- It developed an antediluvian software to misure your internet bandwidth and line quality that used to work only on Windows, that should have been left alone without interfering for 24/48 hours and most of the time was not working (instead of asking for fucking *DSL minimum attenuance/SNR/QoS levels by law)
Believe me, they are just trying to abuse of their power for some juice and I hope Apple and Samsung will go via EU legal routes just to let everything fall apart
p.s. I really hope our cousins from the other side of the Alps will do much better, no matter what's the stake
https://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/42177-apple-crippled-qu...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15255318/qualcomm-sues-ap...
Yes!
I've found that if I run it in airplane mode then the perf is OK.
If your clients do not care about security updates for older models, and happily buy new models which carry a 300+% profit margin, why on earth would they justify not doing what they are doing. It is money, plain and simple.
And this minuscule fine will only make it worse. Because now they know the low cost of continuing to do that.
iOS 12 officially supports the following devices, per Apple.
iPhones: XS, XS Max, XR, X, 8, 8 Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 6, 6 Plus, SE, 5S
iPads: 12.9" Pro 2nd gen, 12.9" Pro 1st gen, 10.5" Pro, 9.7" Pro, 6th gen, 5th gen, Air 2, Air, mini 4, mini 3, mini 2
iPods: touch 6th gen
That's 26 different base models, of I don't care to count how many different physical form factors, each of which was/is offered in multiple configurations and has different onboard hardware and capabilities.
Incidentally:
I don't understand why they can't write their OS updates to work properly on a few generations of older models
They support 8 generations of iPhones, 11 generations of iPads, and one generation of iPod, with the oldest supported devices dating to 2013.