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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

I was a die hard android user from its release until last year, my pixel 2 had simply become unusable due to battery life and performance issues that I'm 90% certain were related to ad tracking on android apps.

It's 2021, servers are a fraction of the pice and vastly easier to deploy than they were in '08 when Apple needed google for these apps.

I'm not convinced we use the G-suite of products for any particularly good reason other than they have a G and they are free. For the margins and scale of ios Apple could easily provide equivalent apps in-house if customers need them to be free or let the market set the price for non-ad supported versions.

Since switching I've only used gmail and maps/waze from g-suite. I'm 90% certain I can replace maps/waze in the near future.

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A pixel 2 is a 4 year old phone... I wouldn't be surprised if your battery is performing at a fraction of its original capability, and that might be slowing down performance too. It's not like Apple is immune to this either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

The pixel 2 was my 4th android, and I honestly hadn't experienced anything quite like the performance issues on the pixel 2 in the last 2 years.

You had the last 3 phones for ~4 years each as well? Android has only existed for ~10 years...

Look, it might very well be a shitty phone. Just saying that after 4 years I'd cut any phone a break. Especially since phones got impractically thin, batteries have really struggled to work the way they do when they are new after a year or two.

The Android Developer Phone 1 was announced in December 2008. I got mine in March 2009. That's twelve years next month.

I still miss the hardware keyboard.

It's anecdotal, but I've replaced the battery on my Pixel 2 and it works like new again. I've also replaced a friend's Pixel 2 battery and they held off on buying a new phone for another year or two.

Phone batteries generally lose 20% of capacity every ~500 cycles. So lumost may well have a battery with only 1/2 the original capacity or less. [1]

[1] This is for iPhone, but I imagine it's similar for all devices. https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT208387

It's not just the cycles, it's also time. Li-Ion batteries deteriorate over time regardless of cycling. That's why you want to make sure the battery you buy hasn't been sitting on a shelf somewhere for 2 years.

> my pixel 2 had simply become unusable due to battery life and performance issues that I'm 90% certain were related to ad tracking on android apps.

Pretty sure that's just crappy google quality. My 2 year old Samsung is going strong. It became marginally faster with the latest update.

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