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Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

I never had problems with devices becoming slow where a factory reset does not help, this sounds odd since a factory reset clears all configuration data. I tend to install some AOSP-derived distribution on devices which are supported (or which I port it to myself), for those for which I can not find a working distribution I pare down the factory distribution as much as I can by removing bloat and replacing obnoxious apps with functional ones from F-Droid. This makes it possible to use e.g. a Samsung Galaxy SIII from 2014 with Android 11 as a daily device for 'dangerous' work.

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The problem is not with the data but what's under it: a flash memory chip the manufacturer cheaped out on.

Never had problems with those either, who made those Android devices with such short-lived eMMC chips? I'm using a number of old Android devices from both well-known manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung and Sony as well as lesser-known ones like Ainol, none of these suffer from memory-induced slowdowns. In my experience it is the battery and the touch screen which are most likely to give out first. The battery can be replaced, sometimes the touch screen can as well but I tend to just use those devices for purposes where I don't need a screen (which I often actually just disconnect to save power) such as MPD-based media players, a trailer camera and IP cameras.

A guess: You don't (re)write data on your phone storage much? This experience is common for my girlfriend who takes 50 GB of photos every few months, transfers them all to the PC and does it again, but uncommon for me who practically never uses the internal storage except for apps.

Not really, these devices all have seen intensive use and are still being used in that way. Some only have a tiny amount of flash on board (e.g. Motorola Defy only has 2GB, I have 5 of these running as media player, MPD player, trailer camera and IP cameras) yet they persevere. Some (e.g. Defy) even have been used with swap-to-eMMC for a while, I ended up disabling this because it is just too slow but it made it possible to run some apps which otherwise would not run on 512MB devices. In short, I have not had problems with flash wear - yet.

>who made those Android devices with such short-lived eMMC chips?

Asus/Google did, the Nexus 7 would brick itself after a 2-4 years from failing/worn out eMMC flash.

I gave my Galaxy Nexus to my dad, so it saw longer use than usual. After five years it was virtually unusable. It was already slow when I stopped using it.

My Nexus 5, which is sitting in a drawer nowadays, also becomes ever slower. Even my HP Veer, keeping the Nexus 5 company, isn’t getting any faster either—even though it never saw real use.

So yeah, basically all manufacturers “do it”. It’s not even about heavy use or anything.

Just because it is running Android 11 does not mean it has seen meaningful security fixes in the last half decade.

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