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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

I've been an Android fanboy, but I'm starting to hit a point that I'll probably switch to iPhone. Like clockwork, my Android phone becomes unstable after about 2 years. Everything slows down, lock ups happen more frequently.

On top of that you have constant tweaks and changes - often on useless things. This year, an update "improved" the clock app. It's now harder to set alarms - and about once per week I get an alarm going off without any UI to disable it. I just have to reset my phone.

Why in the world does a stable, reliable feature like the clock app suddenly introduce a major change.

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> my Android phone becomes unstable after about 2

What do you attribute that to? Is it software updates that slow it down or some kind of pile up of junk that somehow slows it down like Windows 95 used to get?

> On top of that you have constant tweaks and changes…

Yeah, that exists on the iPhone too. Can’t think of anything off the top of my head but I promise you they make things worse sometimes with redesigns and take a few point releases (or even entire releases) to fix them.

The difference is that iOS bugs get fixed pretty quickly, which makes me believe that people inside Apple actually use their own products, so they spot the problems and address them very fast.

Compare that to Android 12 on Pixel phones. Users can't make phone calls due to some bug, and Google is going to provide a fix by the end of January! Do you think they'd delay it that long if they used their own products?

I often wonder whether Page and Brin carry iPhones and run ad-blockers.

i bet they have cool ones with big cracks on the screen

> What do you attribute that to? Is it software updates that slow it down or some kind of pile up of junk that somehow slows it down like Windows 95 used to get?

I'll add that in addition to software, Android hardware typically experience more NAND degradation, which can slow the phone down. A possible explanation being that iPhones use NVMe storage vs the cheaper eMMC/UFS type found on Android.

AFAIK the slowdown is due to cheaper lower quality Flash memory.

99% latencies increase as the flash memory wears or fills, and I think the UI gets intermittently blocked on writes.

Very interesting. This aligns with my experience. It also explains the random crashes and freezes. Things might just go missing.

I just did that when the iPhone 13 released. My social circle couldn't believe that I got an iPhone after me being extremely critical of them. After a few months, it's a bad experience, Android is clearly more user friendly, customisable, powerful, but it doesn't work.

iOS may be locked down like crazy and have UX from 10 years ago, and the keyboard is atrocious (even swiftkey is way worse than the android version), but it works reliably.

My partner has an iPhone 8 that still works perfectly fine, and much faster than my 3 year old flagship Android. Why the performance degrades after 2 years, I have no clue, plus it happens across brands (seen it with Samsung, LG, Sony)...

I tend to think that if you want an Android, you must use it with a third party ROM (Android distribution) to mitigate this, additionally to some privacy concerns.

However this is a hit and miss affair. You need to buy your phone with this in mind (always do this, even if you don't intend to use it yet) and many are quite unstable (LineageOS and /e/ are quite good).

I'm back on Android for now (it has some apps and freedoms I prefer), but I have been at a point recently at which I have said holy shit, fuck this and bought an iPhone. And it was nice. No constant worrying whether my battery would suddenly drain to 0. Much, much, much fewer random delays, frame drops and stutters. And that's on an iPhone X.

>Like clockwork, my Android phone becomes unstable after about 2 years. Everything slows down, lock ups happen more frequently.

have you tried lineageos? My 5 year android phone (flagship) is still usable with lineageos. The only lags I get are from heavy SPAs inside firefox.

I'd guess the problem is with Firefox. I have a (very simple) Home Assistant instance on my local network. Chrome takes a second or two to load and render it, Firefox takes 10-15 seconds.

Ye, I always disable non-security related updates on pretty much all my hardware, then do a update once a year for new features on some stuff.

Recently got access to Windows 10 LTSC from a company I worked with and installed it on my workstation, super fast compared to the modern version I was using (LTSC build is 3 years old IIRC) and didn't find any downside compared to 10 Pro, so can recommend that for any dev that feels like their machine is too slow.

Is there a way to disable all unnecessary services in Windows 10 to make it be as close to LTSC as possible?

The main draw of LTSC IMO is the 10 year support period. You can continue installing the monthly updates, and not have to worry about a feature update. Those are the ones that come twice a year, and ruins your day by taking 1 hour to install, resets random settings in the process (eg. default apps or telemetry settings), randomly changes the layout/color scheme, and randomly replaces your built in apps with worse ones (https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/12/07/redesig...). A debloating script doesn't protect you against those.

as for disabling bloat in non-LTSC versions, there's various scripts floating around, eg. https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline/ or https://ameliorated.info/

These are Android-type reasons for switching away. Again Apple offers an option that just sucks less.

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