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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

> Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were

Those are some rose-tinted glasses for sure. Android lacked basic performance and stability for years after release.

I apologize for not being clear; I was referring primarily to 4.4 "KitKat". Still have a tablet that I run with that on it (offline) to read ebooks. Quite nice. You are correct though - pre-4.0 was pretty rough.

Yeah agreed. I am torn presently between the feature creep and the fact that new phones are so physically faster computationally that Android can finally scroll smoothly.

Even my 2017 KeyOne with 2GB RAM and a slower class SoC runs fine; the only caveat is I've disabled GApps. I realize this is a large ask for some, but I think it's important to point out that Android itself isn't terribly heavy, Google's tracking is.

I'm quite partial to 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, the last release with the "Phablet" UI layouts meant for the Nexus 7. I had a Galaxy Note Ⅱ at the time, and it was easy to get that UI by changing the screen DPI setting or using a custom build like Paranoid Android: https://i.imgur.com/O8lSsXn.png

Android hasn't gotten slower. Android apps have had feature creep and the lack of native code makes them slow. A good example is the Google Maps app which has consistently gotten slower every year because the devs clearly only test it on flagship phones with gobs of RAM.

Android has been getting slower because of security enhancement like disk encryption and aslr, and probably mitigation for Spectre/meltdown.

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