I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

kooslooijesteijn.net

121 pointszdw196 comments

Software bloat really is an epidemic. As a web developer of 20+ years it's a source of constant frustration and sadness for me.

Seriously, your app does not need to be an app; it should be a website.

And seriously, your six-page website with slideshow and photo gallery does not need a React-Angular-Vue hybrid frontend, Firebase logging, analytics, local storage, or any of the other 75 JavaScript files served from eight different external domains.

I have an iPad Air 2 lying around. It's ridiculous how slow websites are on that, what is [/was] a decent piece of hardware from 2015. Even attempting to load the YouTube home page - never mind playing a video - is basically impossible. There's just no reason for it. It's fucking ridiculous.

> And seriously, your six-page website with slideshow and photo gallery does not need a React-Angular-Vue hybrid frontend, Firebase logging, analytics, local storage, or any of the other 75 JavaScript files served from eight different external domains.

Damn, where I can find developers like you? :) It seems like a dying breed :)

Every developer I come across tries to sell me technology he/she is familiar with instead of looking at problem and making simple solution work.

Like you have said, we don't need Angular/Vue where WordPress works.

We don't need Python/Anaconda where simple php script will do.

We don't need some ridiculous node based thread management where Linux cronjobs would perfectly do.

We are, mostly educated on the old ways of development, approaching 50y over here.

I am "old school" as well. And yes we are a dying breed which depresses me.

>And seriously, your six-page website with slideshow and photo gallery does not need a React-Angular-Vue hybrid frontend, Firebase logging, analytics, local storage, or any of the other 75 JavaScript files served from eight different external domains.

As a web developer, can you tell us why this happens, and how do we stop it? I see no market reason for it, it certainly doesn't make your business make more money, it feels much more like groupthink in the industry and chasing hype.

If you build it, devs will come. People want to use new tech and any interesting feature finds users.

New things tend to never be less complex than old things, and unless the devs experience the pain of things being slow, they’ll keep building in bloat (i.e. as long as things run well on their new several thousand dollar macbooks)

>People want to use new tech and any interesting feature finds users.

No user cares about the front end framework you use unless such a choice affects performance though. That's my point, it's something developers enjoy, but users really do not care about.

Semi-direct response from someone else: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

It’s an interesting analysis but I think the cause is less conscious and more of a side-effect of overstaffed tech companies giving too much importance and reward to tooling projects (i.e. tech marketing/reputation)

This is a fantastic post. You should share here on HN

Why does it happen? CV stuffing. Hiring managers are always looking for developers having 10 years experience with the latest technology that was released last year </sarcasm>.

Hiring managers don't care about how simple your previous solutions were to build and maintain and whether it allowed your customers to continue using "outdated" systems. If you don't have the latest alphabet soup of technology on your CV and you just got laid-off by your cush job then good like finding another job!

As a result, everybody stays on the technology treadmill and looking for opportunities to use the latest and greatest technologies so they can include that on their CV and appear to be relevant. This is also great for the conference circuit and "developer advocates" leading sessions on how to use the latest-and-greatest technologies to build the same damn things we've been building for the past 20 years. Except now you need training and new tooling and you don't know where all the gotchas are in the development. Consultants will swoop in (who also have zero experience with these technologies other than some side project they did) and "help" you spend that abundant cash you don't have.

It's sad. It's really, really sad - but it's been this way for the past 40 years (probably longer - that's just how long I've been developing software) and I don't see it ending anytime soon.

Meanwhile, God created the world in six days using Emacs to write Lisp code running on a Unix kernel created with C...

The market reason is companies internally rewarding engineers for developing and marketing these tech projects, then cargo cult in the industry for less sophisticated management and investors, coupled with resume building of developers. All of that fueled by easy money. That makes powerful incentives aligned.

not the OP, but I guess much of the software or the sites are shipped when "good enough", not "when optimal", nobody pays you for optimizing the page or the app for speed, when it's fast enough on their iPhone 14

Because it looks better. No one except the HN crowd likes pulling up a site and seeing static HTML.

That's a bit of an extreme and that isn't what I or anyone else in OP was saying was the only alternative for a six page web app. There is definitely a space between plain HTML and the "hybrid Angular-React-Vue frontend[0]" that doesn't require a huge number of js frameworks to render six pages.

[0] yes even I Mr. scientist know that's a joke, but don't think it's too far off.

This is a styling issue for the majority of web apps.

I know that personally, I would prefer a Jira (or Twitter) that doesn't show a half-rendered page with a million little spinners in every content area. This is using what I imagine is some kind of React-like abomination. It is the furthest thing from fast, or attractive.

A slideshow and some toggle functionality is fine. But you don't need a react/vue etc framework for that, and 99% of websites fall within this requirement.

Generally agree with your points, but prefer apps over web sites. My IDE, text editor, paint programs, etc. better not require the internet to function.

I'm preferring offline more and more.

But if it is a webcentric app, which most are. I mean things that basically need the web, online shopping, up-to-date statistics (like sports) forums, social media. I personally prefer thicker clients for somethings. But a lot of those things are better off as a website.

I agree. (No, Amazon I don't want to use your app!) I guess social media and the like are getting a lot less important to me so I am focusing on them less and less.

Most people generally don't use their phone or mobile device for these tasks, so an installable application makes sense. I think what OP is talking about is this phenomenon of needing an installed app taking up storage space just for fairly simple tasks the web can handle just fine. Most of the time the installed apps require internet to properly function anyway.

Yes, you're correct about tasks that need the internet.

And yet, while I hate Instagram asking me to use their app when their web site is more than adequate, I am beginning to wonder if there was an offline utility to Instagram. Like, perhaps I could prepare and enqueue a post or two offline and when there is connectivity — up it goes. That would be the only reason I would prefer their app over their site.

But I think a lot of apps just sort of sayonara if there is no internet. Obviously browsers do....

You can build offline first web sites/apps, the tech is all there.

But it takes more thought and planning up front or tons of work to bolt it on.

The payoff for doing it is unclear even if it provides a much better experience for users 3% of the time when network access is nil or fuzzy.

I’m so in line with you. I explicitly made my website load as little crap as possible for that reason.

I gave up on browsing the web in my iPad for that reason. Nowadays, I basically use it as an overpowered kindle. I download content.. and read or play it in my iPad. It’s seriously depressing.

Every time someone tries to sell me some “you need X tech in your website”.. I send them to http://berkshirehathaway.com

> Switching back and forth between apps resets their state. That’s particularly annoying trying to decide if I should change trains at the next station and switch between the train ticket app and Google Maps.

This really drives me nuts. It seems this is due to iPhones having very little ram (even the newest 14 Pro Max has 6 GB whereas my 11 Pro Max has 4 GB). But Android phones regularly have double the ram. iPhones could get away with less ram since the CPU is very fast and the OS and apps seem to be faster too, but considering that ram is very cheap, I really wish they would just add more ram. Then again this is also true of the Macbooks which starts at 8 GB, the same as my 2018 Thinkpad.

> I really wish they would just add more ram.

The problem the author of TFA has is that they have been adding more RAM. And apps then make use of that increased amount of RAM. So older devices with less RAM now suffer. It’s about the derivative, not the absolute amount.

Regarding the state resetting, I believe what’s more relevant is the ratio between total RAM and the maximum RAM a single app is allowed to allocate. Or maybe iOS should do more swapping? Not sure how it works.

I think swap was just launched for the first time on Apple mobile devices with iPadOS 16. Pretty sure still none of the phones swap; you’re app is either in RAM or shut down.

iOS is much more aggressive about suspending and killing backgrounded apps than Android. Apps are expected to recover from this on their own in order to provide the illusion of seamless runtime, but the difficulty of doing so scales I think superlinearly with the complexity of a given app's state, and between that and most apps these days being more like rich web browsers in that they're obligate clients for a source-of-truth backend, most devs don't seem to bother.

Honestly, I don't care how aggressive iOS is with this.

But why does Apple allow all these applications in the app store that aren't properly coded for when they get tombstoned (or whatever the term is).

Even modern applications like Yelp 'suffer' from this. And I have the latest iPhone with the most RAM.

The irony being that Android is the one whose SDK has a hell of a lot of support for this sort of suspension and recovery.

The app switching model for iOS apps has been “expect to be killed at any time” from day 1. The APIs and such are built into almost everything and everywhere it is relevant, because that is the iOS model. Terminating an app that isn’t being used is always better for battery life and system performance. Doing that well has been why iDevices have always had less ram than equivalent generation android devices.

The problem is the increasing number of giant custom “cross platform” apps, that require vastly more ram, and have never put any effort into actually being good software. Given all the BS reasons apps get rejected from the App Store the fact that not handling sudden termination isn’t something that gets apps rejected is obnoxious.

iOS has just as much support for this too. It’s built into the default constructor for all UI elements, but most devs just ignore it.

> most devs don’t seem to bother

And by devs, let’s be clear it’s product owners. As a dev this isn’t hard to do. The problem is making sure it’s made a priority.

As a product manager who cares about experience and craftsmanship, I hear you.

On Pixel devices the only apps that I've noticed this happening on are banking/finance related; I assume that's for security reasons and part of the app design.

I have a Moto G7 Play, a budget phone released in early 2019 with 3GB of RAM.

This happens pretty much any combination of apps, most of the time.

My favorite is when I am trying to authenticate to a stupid website that stupidly uses SMS-based 2FA.

I will log into the website and it will show me the 2FA input page. I then switch to my SMS app to read/copy the authentication code. When I switch back to the web browser, the state is gone. It tries to reload the same URL but of course that's invalid and the operation fails.

Yeah, webview doesn't seem to have support for saving the JS VM and DOM to disk. Maybe a custom implementation could do this, but it may also quite slow.

If I were you, I'd try a few different browser apps which don't use WebView until you find one that has proper save/restore of the open web pages to disk.

I use Fennec, a Firefox fork. It doesn't save shit lol

That's strange, to say at least.

Moto g8 for a couple of years, now g30. Just works. Can't say I have a lot of apps, though I definitely doesn't have an app for every burger joint down the street.

DDG and FF as browsers.

How old is your Pixel, though? If you try to use a phone that's old enough, you'll experience this every now and then, especially when switching between newer, RAM-hungry apps.

Go for a non-flagship, less-expensive phone with less RAM, and I expect it happens even more often.

(To be fair, my experience has been similar: on my Pixel 4 I don't have issues like this. But I've seen it happen on older phones in the past.)

I used my Pixel 2 well into the days of Pixel 5 (then I got a 4 for cheap.) I'm on a 7 now, but my comments apply to the older Pixels that I've had. I usually keep my phones for up to 3-4 years and get previous gen unless I can get a great deal.

They’re all officially EOL agree the years. Except the 7, which gets an additional 2 years of security updates.

Also, any other Android office will not get this. I have a Samsung lying around which basically was useless 2 years after

Pixel 3 was a terrible device as a high end because of only 4GB of RAM. I wanted to get it but it was deal breaker.

I had a Pixel 3 and I absolutely loved it. I only traded it in for a Pixel 7 last year because Google's trade in values were so aggressive and it was approaching a year beyond EOL. Frankly, still like the Pixel 3 far more than the Pixel 7. Pixel 3 remains my all time favorite phone. It was basically perfect except for battery life that didn't quite last all day.

I had a Pixel 3 and loved it. Not sure it's fair to say that it's a terrible device if you never owned it.

I only updated to a Pixel 5 last year because the battery was deteriorating after several years and I was given a Pixel 5 for free.

I have never experienced any app resets with the 3 or 5 (aside from banking, which is by design), and I switch between maps, browsers, camera etc. very often.

I had used an Android phone with 4GB of ram before Pixel 3 was revealed. I felt it's not enough RAM even at the time. Pixel has less bloatware so RAM usage would be a bit less, but still I didn't want to spend for brand new less RAM device. I heard complainant about background music app is killed.

You should have, it was easily the best device Google ever made. Shame about the comically short update period or I’d still be using it.

I suspect this helps drive forward upgrade cycles. The default options for Mac (which the majority of non-technical users will buy) are also pretty low and the bare minimum anyone should be working with. It's probably fine for browsing Facebook, but in a few years' time it will not be enough for more- pushing non-technical users into a cycle of upgrading their laptops every 2-3 years when it should be more like every 5-6.

I always assumed it was because the Java virtual machine required more memory to operate at the same efficiency as the ARC apps on iOS.

I was thinking about switching TO iPhone to avoid this phenomena. Apparently, I might as well just stick on Android.

What apps/phone do you experience this with? I really only see this happening with finance-related apps on Pixel devices.

That's also been my experience on Pixels.

It wouldn't even take a kilobyte to remember the current directions in google maps. The fact that it forgets them every time you switch apps is unbelievable. I thought they were using it to force people to log in, but does it happen if you're logged in too?

I have a 2018 iPhone XS and I suffer from the same problem. A few minutes (or less) and apps/browser tabs start getting killed, and most apps handle this by simply nuking all state. Multitasking is completely impossible. It’s infuriating.

I’ll give you an example of Apple and RAM.

In my country, latest Mac Mini costs ₹ 60K. Of course that comes with 8GB RAM. Add 8GB more and cost balloons to ₹ 80K. A 33% increase in price!

> iPhones could get away with less ram since the CPU is very fast and the OS and apps seem to be faster too

Too little RAM is taxing storage since the OS is swapping out/in pages from and to memory, and to a way lesser extent to the CPU. The second part of your sentence does not make much sense either, since perceived responsiveness of the user and actual OS performance are very distinct and separate metrics.

Garbage collected applications require 2x-4x more memory to run efficiently. Android apps use GC. IOS apps do not use GC. Therefore apple can ship devices with less memory to get the same effective functionality. Less memory means smaller batteries or longer battery life. It’s a good trade off that gives apple more flexibility in terms of hardware platforms.

> iOS apps do not use GC

Aren’t a lot of apps just running JavaScript (ahem, React “Native”)?

This problem was one of the things that drove me to get a new iPad Pro recently. I assume it is a RAM issue.

And the fact that Apple doesn't sell first party cases for devices as old as my last iPad Pro, and my case was falling apart. Oh, and my first gen Apple Pencil wasn't charging and the charging UX for it sucks.

4GB of RAM should be easily enough to hold dozens of apps open for instant switching. I use GNU/Linux on a phone with 3GB RAM and it doesn't need app suspension at all - well, except for the web browser (unless you use things like NoScript of course).

I think dram chips use a lot of power? Could be the lower ram helps with battery life?

My laptop has had 8 GB of RAM since 2009. My $600 HP that I got in 2022 has 32 GB.

Try to stick your laptop ram in a phone and you'll see why the direct comparison isn't fair.

RAM size is only one part of the story. The speed of the RAM greatly affects the price.

I’ll often quickly go back and forth to an app I’m crafting a reply in to make sure that iOS doesn’t evict it from memory and cause me to lose my progress while I look things up in another app. Bloody annoying.

Not so much ram as it is battery life and performance optimization

what apps have you had this issue with?

Funny to see an article whose title I agree with and realize I'm in the exact same situation. Same phone, actually -- the last iPhone with a small size, headphone jack, touchID, and SIM card slot all in one device.

I've just eliminated most apps from my phone, but the web browser is the ultimate killer for this phone. Stuck on iOS 15's version of webkit, no real ad blockers, no real tweaks (as admirable a job as Hyperweb does) I'm being forced to upgrade thanks to the end of iOS updates.

I've decided to try another small phone: the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, which is roughly the size of the iPhone Mini with a headphone jack, fingerprint sensor, usb-c, and (most excitingly) a notification LED. Of course software support for this 2017 phone is also long gone, but I'm hoping LineageOS + Android's open software environment (giving me Firefox support for years) will keep things going for a while, at least.

I really wish there was a way to keep software support on smartphones for longer. Now that society basically requires every participant to own a smartphone with a data plan, it's as important as allowing walkability and public transit in cities so folks can live without cars, IMO.

I can personally vouch for the XZ1 Compact as a great device! Mine still worked (almost) flawlessly in 2022.

... Until US phone providers started shutting down 3G. As I understand it, in order for the phone to work correctly with towers, the 3G signal needed to be verified as sort of an emergency "fallback" in case 4G/LTE wasn't working. As soon as 3G towers were replaced with 5G, the phone started having severe connectivity issues, even with only 4G/LTE enabled. I don't know if there is a way to get around this, as I also believe the hardware modem is a factor.

I'm not thrilled at this aspect of forced obsolescence. Between (lack of) firmware support, locked root capability, frequency band issues, and non-replaceable batteries, devices are not "supposed" to be used for more than 2 years.

Fortunately, it still works on T-Mobile for VOLTE (Voice Over LTE). Apparently AT&T and Verizon never whitelisted the XZ1 models for the feature, despite the fact that they work just fine. Thankfully I use Google Fi so I'm already on T-Mobile.

A friend of mine has the XZ1 Compact, and I would not recommend it. It was a fantastic phone (with a fantastic camera) when it was released, but Sony dropped support for running apps off the SD card, and the internal storage only has 32GB. (Sony kept support moving apps to the SD card longer than Google/AOSP did, but finally gave up.)

Once the internal storage is nearly filled up, the phone slows to a crawl, randomly reboots (and runs a much slower "fixup" boot process), and some apps stop working, or only partially work. System and app updates stop happening.

It's surprisingly difficult to keep storage usage down, as many apps these days don't know or care about the difference between internal and external storage, and won't let you write app data to the SD card. Recently I helped my friend reset to factory to get a clean slate, then installing only the minimum number of apps she needed, attempting to move whatever data she could to the SD card, but the internal storage filled up again after only a few days.

I'm not sure if LineageOS brings back the ability to move apps to the SD card. I would doubt it, given what kind of massive surgery to the OS that would require. If it doesn't, you're in for a lot of trouble.

I believe LineageOS still supports "Adoptable Storage" that combines your SD card with internal storage. No hassle to move apps around, but you would want a fairly fast SD card since you can't choose which apps to run off SD and which to run off internal storage

https://source.android.com/docs/core/storage/adoptable

I used adoptable storage on LineageOS, and you do in fact have to choose whether apps live on the external or internal storage. Worse than that, in fact, you don't get a choice at installation time. All apps are installed to external storage by default, and the vast majority of apps that I've tried simply don't work until you go into app settings and move it to internal storage. In most cases they crash immediately at startup, but there are occasionally other failure modes like drawing the skeleton of the UI but none of the interactive parts.

Adoptable storage also has the neat failure mode that if you accidentally pop out the SD card while the phone is running, you're in for a real treat.

Also, anytime anyone asks about adoptable storage in the LOS subreddit, the devs always respond that the feature is broken, will not be fixed, and they don't recommend using it.

I don't install a huge number of apps, I plan on mostly just using Fennec + music on an SD card + a couple of messaging apps. So hopefully I won't fill up the 32GB of internal storage. My current SE only has 64GB of storage for all of that combined, and apps only take up one or to GBs tops. I'm sure the situation will be a bit different on Android, but hopefully it won't be too bad.

Sadly it sounds like Adoptable Storage isn't quite functional enough to solve the problem, but in a pinch, it might work. I'll have to investigate if it's compatible with Telegram, which is probably the most storage-hungry app I use thanks to years of media and messages.

Appreciate the warning and transparency, hopefully my situation is more compatible with the XZ1C than yours. Keep your eyes peeled for a "trying LineageOS on the XZ1C in 2023" post on HN in the next couple of weeks, if I'm successful. Otherwise I just purchased a slightly expensive MP3 player.

At the very minimum companies should be obliged to unlock the eol devices and provide the firmware of their components.

Many of the components could have a second life. The main camera for example of the the 2016 iPhone is still better that most webcams. One could use these salvaged sensors to build new hardware.

They should but that also won’t solve the problem. No one is going to maintain a custom OS for ancient iPhones to a standard that makes them work with modern apps.

You can actually install Linux on these old phones, the technical restrictions are long since broken. But there is no funding to make something usable using this capability.

> You can actually install Linux on these old phones, the technical restrictions are long since broken. But there is no funding to make something usable using this capability.

I gave postmarketos a shot for 6 months or so, and sadly I have to agree that it's not ready for daily driving, even by experienced users.

This fairphone 4 on the other hand with lineage 20 looks like it will keep me going for a few more years.

There is an under appreciated world of difference between “booted Linux” and “I can use this as my only phone”. The community can manage the first one, they typically can’t do the second.

Postmarket OS is a cool project but I wouldn’t count on it ever being more than a neat way to tinker with obsolete devices.

To be clear, it could place calls and run a web browser on mobile data. The device was very much a phone.

It falls down (of course) at the larger list of secondary use cases many take for granted. For me it was mobile navigation, though it would also still hard crash noticeably often. I do expect the crashes at least to be fixed next time I look.

You don't have to maintain a custom OS. You just have to be allowed to run your own code, then you can just write a simple webcam app and never need to fiddle with it ever again. You'd probably be surprised at how many developers there are today that do in fact maintain custom software for older rooted iphones, and given that I'm sure a lot more devs would release and maintain even more software if every old iphone under the sun was fully open. Not just the few still on the lucky iOS versions that have a jailbreak released but isn't yet patched.

We already have LineageOS for phones, and it seems to work fairly well. Mfgrs providing specs/driver code/FW would make that effort much easier, and probably attract more volunteers too.

Was in exact same situation, and made the same spreadsheet even, except my prices were higher in India.

I force upgraded to iPhone 13 a few months after it came out, once the leaks confirmed that that 14 wouldn’t have TouchID.

I was a fan of my xz1 compact despite the fact that the square corners wore holes in my jean pockets and that it spontaneously crashed one day never to boot again.

> Now that society basically requires every participant to own a smartphone with a data plan

I feel so very fortunate that this isn't true in my area.

“Phone companies can’t support their hardware forever”

Ok, fine, it should be mandatory then that EOL hardware be unlocked and able to run FOSS operating systems.

iPhone 7, for instance, has plenty of life left in the hardware, yet are being “recycled” due to ended IOS support.

The issue isn't really that the phone stops working, it's that the apps do.

My primary reason for not jailbreaking or rooting my phone is that my banking apps detect it and fail to run.

One of those banking apps (Called BankID) is basically mandatory for living in the Sweden (Similarly in Norway & Denmark).

It's basically an identity verification system that keeps some kind of signed private key in your phone, meaning you can identify yourself for basically everything.

Without that App, the other apps that control my life (my Digital mailbox, my electric company, my phone company, my bank, even paying for things online) do not work.

that's insanely shitty. I saw the same thing in France with the Postal service. I thought "oh good, good old post-office is providing identity, good for them". But yeah, pretty sure it wont be open as well.

"L'identitee numerique la poste" can work under latest magisk. Delete all app data, enable exclusion list and add the app to the exclusion list. You need the app for good old CPF.

I lives outside of the country since a while and they have been hounding me down to onboard. Hm

The iPhone 5S just got a security update a few months ago and even if the newest version of an app doesn’t support the OS version you are running, you can still download the “last compatible version”.

App developers silently kill their own apps through other means too. Try downloading an app like snapchat on that 5s. You won't be allowed to log in with a version that old.

You act as if it is done out of malice. They drop support for older APIs that they don’t have to maintain.

On the other hand, I don’t think Netflix has ever dropped support for its oldest API. As of two or three years ago, Netflix still worked on an original iPad (2010). It was the first mobile device to get Netflix support.

Spotify also worked on my first generation iPad as well as a few other streaming services like Crackle and YouTube

I felt the same way, right up until I started working on mobile apps myself.

One of the first things I figured out after making that jump was that the constraints involved in making an app run smoothly and be just as comfortable to use on something like a 1st gen SE - which is what I used myself, from 2016 through most of 2021 - can't be supported alongside the capabilities and display real estate provided by current models, without an indefinite expenditure of costly developer effort that just isn't economical in supporting a use case that's relevant to something like sixty users out of every thousand.

We've been through this before, with the PC revolution. Things settled down on that front, GPUs excepted, right around the time smartphones became a thing. The complaints are more or less exactly the same, and so are the reasons they receive little of consequence by way of response. None of which is to say you should upgrade your phone if you don't really want to, but - speaking as one who has done so himself, prior to having discovered firsthand why things are the way they are - yelling at the entire industry to change how it functions at a fundamental level has much more of King Canute about it than of any really worthwhile expenditure of effort.

> without an indefinite expenditure of costly developer effort that just isn't economical in supporting a use case...

How much would it cost? $1B US? Okay. Apple reported a net income of $99.9 Billion dollars from $350B of revenue. That seems like a good use of $1B to keep electronics waste down and improve resale value. That, number btw is 1000 developers at a cost of $1M apiece per year.

Honestly I don't think it would cost a $1B. I think the true cost is in loss of revenue from forced upgrades -- which might be $100B of Apple's revenue.

My circa 2016 Dell XPS 15 still runs pretty good with Windows 10. Not sure why MS forces me to upgrade my hardware to go to Windows 11.

Apple's financials aren't relevant here. Every app developer faces this tradeoff.

If they actually care about the experience they should be relevant.

Think of an analogue to how nvidia sends development help to companies that are making games. Your "confusion of ideas" comment elsewhere is pointed the wrong way.

No, it isn't.

You are demanding of App Store reviewers, and thus implicitly of app developers who have to satisfy review to publish, an equal level of concern with, and effort to support, the experience of the half a percent or so of users still on 4.7"-class devices, as with that of the 99.5% or so on everything else. This would require significant extra work in just about every app, 2x as much in some, probably averaging around 1.5x as much in most. That is not a reasonable expectation.

I've been in that half a percent myself, and I realize those with an attachment to remaining in that cohort will not find such an argument convincing. But I'm also, in retrospect, not really sorry that the last of the five 1st gen SEs I'd been carefully maintaining - four of which I'd bought used, three of which I'd replaced screens and batteries on - landed on its corner when I dropped it a year and a half ago, wrecking the sleep/wake button integral to the mainboard and well beyond any soldering skill I can acquire, and thus effectively requiring a complete replacement that I decided was finally no longer worth it. The 12 mini turned out not to be meaningfully larger or less wieldy than the 1st gen SE had been, and it's a lot more pleasant to use. There's value in not being actively, constantly frustrated by the experience of using my phone - especially since I do that every day for work now, too.

We aren't going to agree on this, I think, and that's fine with me. But I am going to say that I no longer have the sympathy for your perspective that I would have a couple of years ago. It's a perspective I shared for a long time, and one I put more effort into than most. I'm glad I did, not least because learning to fix phones has been useful. But I'm also glad for what I've learned since then, even though it's why I don't share that perspective any more.

On Android, slow old devices are used by poor people, so it is particularly harsh to not support them if your app is critical for them. I class it as an accessibility issue. Because our App was maintained over many many years, we just needed to be careful to continue to support phones we historically supported, and avoid using new features that would break obsolete devices.

That said, we did make decisions at times to drop the few users on older phones, for a variety of different reasons.

We knew how many obsolete phones were used. We knew how many in each of our client companies, so sometimes we held back server updates for specific companies that used old browsers (although we were SaaS, companies were upgraded to new versions independently). To cover our arses, we informed users for a few years that their device was obsolete, and that the App would stop working at some point in the future.

> This would require significant extra work in just about every app, 2x as much in some, probably averaging around 1.5x as much in most. That is not a reasonable expectation.

This is not a reasonable estimate of the work needed.

Also I was thinking more of "don't waste tons of memory, making it unable to run on devices with less", which could just be a mandatory rule for everyone's benefit.

> This is not a reasonable estimate of the work needed.

One of the things that did the most to change my mind on this subject was actually estimating that work - specifically, estimating what it'd take in a live and fairly complex app, which is where most teams would have to start.

(You haven't lived till you've tried to prototype a complicated custom time series chart control with several interactions, that can transparently render itself across a wide range of sizes and be legible and usable in all of them. You really haven't lived till you've tried to test it!)

Another was seeing for myself in Amplitude both the absolute fraction and the trend for how few users would even be in a position to notice the result.

> Also I was thinking more of "don't waste tons of memory, making it unable to run on devices with less", which could just be a mandatory rule for everyone's benefit.

I agree this is worth more than it's valued. Would such a singleminded focus be to everyone's benefit, though? Most apps might not spend much effort on clean UI restore after suspend, but actual data loss is very rare in my experience, and teams have only the capacity that they do. That makes it a tradeoff between features and other bugfixes, and this; the next request I see in Canny for showing the launch screen less often on app switch will be the first, an absence which likewise leads me to suspect that the wants of users in general aren't accurately captured in the perspective of those who are heavily invested on this point.

But where does the line between "wasting memory and resources" and "wanting to make a game that utilises the full power of a modern phone" go?

It's REALLY hard to make a game that works equally well on the latest and greatest and also that one weird Android phone someone in the Philippines bought in an outdoor market.

If you're truly using that power, and can't just turn down the graphics, that's fine. The complaint is when boring apps like the train ticket handler start running out of memory at random. A huge majority of non-game apps could fit into a small amount of resources if the devs tried.

recyclers are literally having to shred M1 laptops because apple locks out the logic chips. They _deliberately_ will not do that until the government makes them. My next iphone will be usb c, I can wait until then, so they better hurry if they want sales.

Only because the owners did not unlock them when they gave them up for recycling.

The reason for the breaking change was supposedly for TPM 2.0, to have a fully-attested chain from UEFI load to user login. This was lessened to a lower TPM version later, thus rendering the entire requirement moot.

> How much would it cost? $1B US? Okay.

For a game developer that barely raised $1m for the first title?

The assumption appears to be that all development of iOS apps is ultimately funded by Apple, or that Apple could somehow make all apps on its platform magically work equally well on all devices. But I admit I'm just guessing here: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such [an analysis]."

Exactly, the prices are just numbers. We could decide that electronic waste is too expensive to be carried this way.

Apple is requiring that recyclers shred perfectly fine M! laptops because they lock out the logic chips. E-Waste is cheap if it means you keep supply out of the secondary markets.

I mean the real price. In term of carbon emission and damage to our surroundings. Not some dollars or yen value.

The stolen ones, sure. The legitimate ones are trivially easy to resell.

One question I wish app developers would ask themselves is "does my app actually need to be an app"?

I'd guess something like 90% of apps could actually be websites instead, in which case you automatically avoid the framework and multi-platform bullshit inherent to app-making.

Other than games, or special hardware access, 99% of the apps can be done as mobile apps.

Although I would rather do native, and Web is messy, not having to deal with Android whims, Android Studio stable releases that aren't, Android Java vs Kotlin, NDK experience that makes me miss Symbian C++,.... I am surely happier having gone back to Web.

Here, try it on your phone, https://whatwebcando.today/

I'm guessing that in almost 100% of those cases, the decision to make an app vs a web site are not being made by the developers.

Sure, 90% of apps could be websites, but unfortunately 90% of websites are horrible Frankensteinish user experiences and 99% of websites require users to be online.

Web apps are way heavier than native ones though. And for every person wanting a web app there is another one that would rather have a native one.

On the other hand, I use some software on my modern sized iphone that's been scarcely updated since 2016 if at all. It was built for the SE form factor, but ios ui libraries can scale ios ui elements to the display size just fine.

Developers just need to write performant code again like they don't have a modern iphone to work with. Performant code has benefits even when you have the latest iphone pro/max/whatever in your pocket, since it means the app will hardly be consuming battery life. Too many apps these days kill my battery life doing hardly anything at all, rendering some text and banner ads perhaps.

>You decided that if less than 1% of your users use a certain old device, it’s no longer relevant. Which is odd, because to many businesses, 1% of users can make the difference between profit or loss.

That is not the developer that is the business. They are trying to make more money. If 1% of their users don't matter or are going to upgrade why wouldn't you use the latest tech.

>You decided that you wanted to use some framework/feature/API and save developer time. Which is odd. Because consider how much time you spend trying to not harm the environment in your free time: shopping for sustainable products, bringing your reusable cup, recycling. And then think of the minutes you save with new programming stuff compared to the number of iPhones discarded because of that.

I can assure you moving with the times saves more than minutes. Legacy code bases stop working with the world around them and require crazy hacks to keep them running.

Yet, we really aren't doing that much nowadays.

Current phones are absolute powerhouses, capable of rendering 3d graphics in real time while doing God knows what more. And what does the vast majority of the public do?

Mesagging, vídeos, social network. That's it. That's really it.

Why in Gods name do we require modern phones for this? If someone could do that almost a decade ago, why should requirements go UP? It's maddening, how in the world are we doing stuff worse rather than better with time? To make developers life easier? Is the entirety of the market subsidizing app creation? It's madness

And take sweet pictures. That alone is worth upgrades for a lot of people. Though we are pretty fast approaching a ceiling on what is actually visible to the human eye in terms of improvements. I bet we will start to see diminishing returns in camera tech in the next few years.

We already do see diminishing returns. The lenses on a phone like the iphone 14 pro show pretty bad lens flair in certain lighting situations. I've compared it side by side between a friends 14 pro and my SE2 and I just don't get these effects with my much simpler lens. I suppose the solution is some sort of a hood or more elements for that big lens on the 14 (the way a larger camera would solve these issues), but its already large enough where the phone no longer sits flat on a table even with a case.

Some threads showing the double imaged effect which is especially pronounced with neon signs: https://old.reddit.com/r/iPhoneography/comments/yhsy8s/iphon...

https://old.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/zu7jmj/iphone_14...

Apparently this has been going on since at least the iphone 12 and 13:

https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/q06u1y/insane_lens_...

Recent iPhones have arguably become worse with all the AI processing they are applying to photos.

> You decided that you wanted to use some framework/feature/API and save developer time. Which is odd. Because consider how much time you spend trying to not harm the environment in your free time: shopping for sustainable products, bringing your reusable cup, recycling. And then think of the minutes you save with new programming stuff compared to the number of iPhones discarded because of that.

"Minutes"? It doesn't take minutes of time to support old phones, it can take hours, sometimes days or weeks.

And I barely spend minutes recycling; I just pick the right bin.

I have to really disagree with this. This isn't something like a microwave we're talking about where the tech hasn't changed in decades. This is literally something on the bleeding edge of chips and technology, where the ability to compute really does go up a ton every 5 years.

Add on to that the fact that most people use it many hours a day, this equal something like a thousand hours a year. So even a top of the line phone that you refresh every 3 years is something you pay cents an hour to use -- quite low.

If you're from a developing country or the low end of a developed country, I can see how not upgrading your phone every 3 years can be important. If you have moderate resources from a developed country, not being willing to upgrade your phone is frankly a utility mistake for most people.

If phone makers have to support old devices, there is a lot of developer time, testing, etc that is needed.

In the end, I think the flaw of the article is the same flaw as below: some people get upset that if a small streak damages something like 10 pixels on a 4K screen, it's cheaper to replace the entire thing than to fix it. Replacing the entire thing seems like "waste". Not so: repairing the screen is actually waste, because it requires lots of skilled human time. Replacing the screen is mostly cheap automatic assembly. Likewise, it "feels bad" to throw away a working phone, but actually the societal cost of supporting very very old phones would be a lot more than having an ecosystem where most people want to upgrade every couple of years -- in a arena that is actually changing fast.

> This is literally something on the bleeding edge of chips and technology, where the ability to compute really does go up a ton every 5 years.

That's cool and all but going up should be a choice. If someone doesn't want new features, they shouldn't have to buy new hardware.

You are considering only the economy, but I think people keeping older phones are also considering the environment (carbon dioxide, other pollution, mining etc).

That's the main reason I'm using a 5 year old phone.

Apple has an amazing recycling program (I know because I’ve seen Daisy in action). If you care about all that, bringing your iPhone to Apple at the end of its lifetime is the best decision you can make.

Apple puts most phones into a shredder for 'recycling'. [Daisy is cool, but...](https://www.ifixit.com/News/15794/apple-daisy-cobalt-recycli...)

Thanks for explaining to me what I personally saw during my press visits to Apple recycling facilities.

I think phones are now perhaps approaching a plateau of "good enough" for anything resembling the current applications, but 2GB of RAM definitely ain't there. That doesn't cut it for a modern multitasking OS with loads of high-res graphics to go along with a high-res screen.

I've had an iPhone XS since it was released, it's only just barely starting to show its age, mostly with shorter battery life. Five years is a good long run for constantly-improving tech. Life is short, you simply won't have to worry about that many upgrades.

Sometimes I think the screen race is shooting the device in the foot. Anything after the retina display in the iphone was just diminishing returns. People aren't going to notice refresh rate or more pixels beyond what they can already resolve at that distance scrolling instagram, but it sure makes for great ad copy. I'm a bit of a radical where I think retina display is overkill on a laptop even, since I'm sitting here on my 1280x800 pixel laptop and I can't see any pixels from where the laptop actually sits in practice.

What did people use iphones for 10 years ago? Mobile web, email, social media, texting, watching videos, that sort of thing. What do people use iphones for today? The exact same stuff. Why are we buying more powerful crap by the year to do the exact same functionality? Its like an arms race over nothing.

This article strikes close to home as I'm still using my 16GB iPhone 6. A lot of apps have stopped supporting iOS 12, forcing me to to reluctantly replacing them with webpage shortcuts where possible (even then it is not a particulary enjoyable experience). Seeing as how most apps follow a minimalist design language, it bothers me that I need an increasingly powerful phone for apps that are simpler than before (at least visually).

Dude I have a Huawei (amazing otherwise) and I cant even install most american apps, while they'd work perfectly...

But I have to admit the sheer force of the Google detox made me stop a lot of their products, use throwaway gmail accounts everywhere, no cross device sync and all that stuff and I feel... free and light. Ironic isn't it ?

was there a large difference between the iPhone 6 and the 6s Plus? i have a 6s Plus as my only iPhone, and it is running 15.7.2 (with an update scheduled for tonight i just saw). why is your 6 stuck on iOS 12?

The 6S had twice as much RAM (2GB vs 1GB) and the processor was not only a good bit faster but throttled less, too.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/a-3d-touch-above-the...

Some apps still work on my 6S but it's getting to the point where we've long since been cast adrift.

I get the author's sentiment. But speaking as an Android developer, we are forced to use newer APIs due to the following:

1. Deprecation - Google is notorious for deprecating APIs (it's a meme among Android devs) and we as developers are forced to move to using newer APIs

2. Google Play policies - From Google: "New apps must target Android 12 (API level 31) or higher; except for Wear OS apps, which must target Android 11 (API level 30) or higher."

3. Some APIs such as Jetpack Compose require a certain minimum SDK version (API 21). Therefore, if you want to use new APIs, you are forced to stop supporting old devices.

We wish we could continue supporting old devices but it's mostly out of app developers' hands.

I just wanted to correct a little bit of misunderstanding here about how target SDK works (and min SDK).

Having a target SDK e.g. at Android 12 doesn't prevent you from supporting versions of Android before 12, it prevents you from fully supporting Android devices newer* than Android 12.

The target SDK defines what is the minimum feature set that you have access to (and sometimes what you're required to implement). If you target API level 31, you can add all of the latest features (e.g. improvements around network usage to save energy that wasn't present in older SDK versions).

You, as a developer, decide on your "min SDK", which is the lowest level of Android that you're willing to accept. That is determined by how much you're willing to work around missing or buggy features in old SDK versions, something with is really helped out by using AndroidX (née Support Library), which is a shim you install that provides compatible implementations of newer features when your APK is installed on older phones (similar to polyfill on web).

* During the beta of a new target SDK, old phones won't run an app targeting it, this is to prevent people from building and shipping apps against a beta SDK.

I decided a long time ago to buy the cheapest unlocked android phone I could get at the time. 6 phones for 2 people over 10 years. I paid 140 to 200 (100-150 US$) pretax for each. This has been mostly Motorola E or G phones. This has kept us current with apps resource needs. The total cost of 6 phone is less than the current cost of an iPhone 14. I have kept all of them and reuse them as night table Alarm clocks or second screens to settle question like "How old is that actor" while watching something.

You should wire them together and make a little K8s cluster to power some services in your homelab

Running containers on android is unfortunately isn't that easy. https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d...

> Bear in mind that you'll have to root your phone, mess with and compile your phone's kernel and docker suite. So, be prepared to get your hands dirty.

You weren’t kidding

FTA: "[my old phone is] like that proverbial old pair of jeans"

Your jeans don't have 0 day exploits whereby someone halfway around the world can steal your banking credentials, private photos/emails, cryptocurrency, etc. Forced obsolescence exists, but I wouldn't put it at fault here.

If you want to blame anyone, blame Apple for locking down their hardware. I still use my old Nexus 6 (released 2014) with an up to date version of LineageOS from time to time. That's impossible with iDevices without a lot of hax or workarounds. 5-6 years is a generous amount of time for a vendor to support a software/hardware stack on a consumer device. It's more time than I've gotten from Google officially.

> Your jeans don't have 0 day exploits whereby someone halfway around the world can steal your banking credentials

...does anyone know if this is actually happening on a significant scale? There are said to be tons of unpatched Android devices in the wild, but when I hear about accounts getting hacked, it mostly seems to be from leaked website databases and/or reused credentials.

If this wasn't happening to people during the jailbreak.me era where people were installing cydia right in the apple retail store on the demo units, then you can be sure its fud that's not rooted in any hard evidence.

>Your jeans don't have 0 day exploits [...]

>[...] I still use my old Nexus 6 (released 2014) with an up to date version of LineageOS from time to time.

If you're paranoid about 0 days, you really shouldn't feel safe with an "an up to date version of LineageOS". Even though they might technically be receiving updates, the kernel and proprietary blobs certainly are not.

> Your jeans don't have 0 day exploits whereby someone halfway around the world can steal your banking credentials, private photos/emails, cryptocurrency, etc.

I dunno a lot of my jeans end up with a hole right in the middle of the crotch and it actually kinda feels similar

Regarding the device in question (iPhone SE 2016) Apple are still releasing security updates for iOS 15. Not forever though, of course.

Theres been plenty of times where apple has not patched an exploit long after it was popular, to the point where people were making viral videos jailbreaking the iphones in the apple retail stores.

Apple is providing 6 years of support for old phones. As the author notes that's more than in the past, where they offered 4 years of support. My experience has been that the first generations had a lot of difference year to year and so when I moved from the 3GS to the 5 it was a massive difference and it would probably have been hard for Apple to support phones for as long as they do today with those handsets. That doesn't mean it's easy to support those old models and if Apple did 8 years of support instead of 6 we would still get these articles (but with ... iPhone 6s?).

At the end of the day things have a design life and Apple does offer pretty good support – and if we do indeed see newer handsets receiving updates for longer the authors argument ends up kind of being negated. If people were willing to pay for software updates after a certain number of years it might be viable but ultimately the author kinds of expect everyone else to support his phone without offering much in how he'll pay for said support with something that can tangibly be used to pay rent. And so it's probably easier the author just buys a new phone and remembers to turn the old one in for recycling.

It sounds like the author wants Apple to let you unlock those device's bootloaders so that they can have an elegant depreciation/recycling lifecycle instead of becoming e-waste that can only be salvaged by a proprietary Apple-designed robot.

That would be good enough for me too, I think.

Seeing as Apple sometimes release patch updates to previous iOS versions (as they've done with iOS 15 just this year) suggests they take security somewhat seriously. Jailbreaking them would have some interesting security implications, especially as it relates to distributing apps via the App Store. The easiest way out of this remains to just buy a new phone and recycle the old one.

Jailbreaking could be allowed with the generalized "boot screen is red now" strategy. The biggest problem is that now you might have a bunch of SE's floating around in the secondary market, _all_ jailbroken just to be supported. But at least that means that in-support devices could still be experimented with, but with an obvious "this has been tampered" with strategy.

They certainly don't have to stop updating people on OFW, I just want the option to unlock the bootloader for my iPhone. Bonus points if I can do it without an iCloud account, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

It's less about jailbreaking and more about ensuring your hardware stays usable even if Apple doesn't think it should be.

In 2009 I found an old Samsung flip phone I last used in 2003. Out of curiosity, I turned it on - it immediately crashed as soon as it tried to talk to a tower. We've definitely come a long way.

I have the same exact phone and it's my "daily driver".

Work provide me with a newer Iphone, so I know what I miss. ( Camera is insanely better on a newer iphone, once or twice a year I will go get my work phone if it's nearby to take a better picture )

For me it's the battery life, I don't install app anymore really, unless absolutely forced. ( City specific parking apps..) I changed the battery twice, the first time it did wonder, the second : meh. I started carrying a battery pack just in case. It would need 2 charges a day easily.

The front facing camera became capricious, too. I can't take selfie anymore. Haha. I do not experience the issue that the autor has with safari, but I did notice the context switching that can loose state. I became weary of doing it without copying whatever I'm typing.

Also, the 32go drive is constantly full. Not great.

Otherwise: Great.

I was actually thinking that this situation starts to be a bit annoying. But I'm probably not getting a new smartphone. Probably going back to flip-phone. Or a fancy dumb-phone. And keeping my work phone when I'm in a place I don't know, so I can conjure the internet anywhere. But that would be an exceptional situation. ( I use maps and car-gps a lots for navigation)

Or : having a portable 5G router handy and a laptop. ( not much worse than the battery pack I carry now )

> You’re making me buy a new phone. No not you, you! I mean you people who decided how apps are built and distributed.

This wasn't a huge issue back when iOS was shipped with useful built-in apps (OS X as well). Over the few last years I find myself switching from some built-ins to AppStore equivalents, or not switching (due to privacy issues etc) and using decreasingly useful Apple built-ins.

I don't need nor want rich text in Notes, Reminders nor Mail but I am forced to have a thick bar taking screen size to show 4-5 rich text icons. I am hiding these "screen decreasers" every time I open up Notes. Then this huge "+" icon persists. Mail is less friendly and doesn't allow me to hide this crap. For some time, I was forced to see some silly emojis whenever I wanted to type text. The "Emoji Keyboard" could be removed in keyboard settings, though.

Oh, and wish I could easily type letters on iPhone keyboard - it used to type what I wanted but now the device plays some ridiculous guessing game and types other letters than pressed, when it "thinks" it knows what word I want to type in.

I no longer seem to be able to take natural photos with my iPhone. I can turn HDR off but remaining ML auto-correction just destroys most pictures. Why do I see some other person resembling myself, after taking a selfie? There is a way to get into raw pictures with some apps but I am longing the times when I didn't have the need for 3rd party apps to make use of an Apple-provided app.

At the same time, with increased bloat, comes less and less configurability. "My" iPhone has to behave like Tim wants it to.

> But most of the time, web developers can apply new features as enhancements.

As an iOS developer, I wish we could do the same in web development and save the author the time in posting this blog. But in reality, this is just hard to do. iOS is very poor in backwards compatibility compared to Android. In iOS we only support 3 major version down, compared to Android we still support up to Lollipop up until last year.

Adoption of newer OS versions on iOS occurs much quicker than Android. There is less benefit from supporting more than 2 or 3 ios versions back. Also, it is arguable whether an app customer that would rather have a flip phone is valuable enough to worry about retaining.

I'm in Southeast Asia, significant number of our users are still using very old Android phones from 5 years ago.

I assume that means there are not many iOS users in your area. Luckily Android is easier to provide backward compatibility with Androidx, and there are more users with older devices (maybe 2-3 yrs old) even in the North American market make it more worth the effort.

Yes Androidx library is a godsend. Definitely more Android users than iOS.

Not a fan of regulation as a solution for most things but it would be kinda nifty if device makers were required to provide an optional jailbreak update for devices once they stop supporting them.

Apple provided 5 years of full years of updates. 2016 through 2021.

I understand the writer’s issue. It seems clear some amount of support should be mandated. After all no one should be able to drop support after 1 year.

But what is the correct length to mandate? Until the radio standard is no longer usable (so when 4G gets turned off)? Just a specific number (5, 7, 10, whatever)?

I can’t think of a single consumer device that has mandated support for any length of time past the warranty, so I don’t think there is precedent. In fact the only mandatory support I can even think of is parts for cars.

So how do you choose the timeframe?

I think you misunderstood him, it's not Apple that he's blaming.

Oh you’re right. I hadn’t caught that on my first read through somehow. Thanks.

I rarely use a smartphone, but I do use a Samsung Galaxy S7 as my phone.. for, phone calls and txts, as an mp3 player, as a GPS when driving and hiking, to read books on when in a waiting room or something. That's about it.

I smashed up my last one and had to buy a new phone. My requirements were... * Not too big (S7 is bigger than I want already) * audio jack * micro sd card slot * Some waterproofness * nice screen (eg. oled) that I can see in direct sunlight

I ended up buying another new-old S7 as I couldn't find any new-new smartphones that fit my requirements.

I grappled with this for a long time. It really went against my frugal ethos to spend so much on consuming disposable, locked down hardware.

I'm in a position now where I am able to use my desktop for computing and the cheapest TCL A3 that money can buy as a phone. It has Google Maps, my bank app on it for mobile deposits, a web browser, and a few other small apps from F-Droid. Works just fine.

I was forced to replace my iPhone 7 because it doesn't support iOS 16. I ended getting a new iPhone SE (3rd generation), which is practically identical in form to the iPhone 7 and so much cheaper than other iPhone models. Not sure I gained much as far as hardware is concerned, but at least I minimized the upgrade fee. It seems like a big waste, because my old iPhone still works perfectly fine.

Funny thing about this, by the time my phone gets to 2-3 years old, I tend to want to replace it anyways. Not so much because I'm craving the new thing, but because the battery now lasts for like 2 hours and is impractical to replace, the case and display have accumulated some small cracks and defects, or I accidentally destroyed or seriously damaged it.

Yes, this is one of the big reasons why I've decided not to replace my smartphone when it dies. Phones are getting more expensive, omitting more of the features I value, getting more intrusive, and the software more intolerable, but nothing is getting better in terms of real benefit to me. Just the opposite.

I'm getting off this treadmill. Dumb phone, here I come!

Which dumb phones have you considered using? I'm thinking of using an android phone without apps or a browser so I could still use it for photos, messaging(signal and matrix), and music.

I'm going dumber than that. I have a couple of $20 dumbphones sitting around that I've used as burners. I couldn't find any that didn't have apps at all, but these have minimal functionality in that department. I can't install any that didn't come with the phone, and those that are there are very basic.

If I can find one that lets me tether, that would be ideal, but not a showstopper requirement.

My intention is to separate computing from the phone, so I'll also carry a real pocket computer for my other needs. The key is that it will be a real computer that I have complete control over, and that doesn't have cell connectivity.

This: "My intention is to separate computing from the phone, so I'll also carry a real pocket computer for my other needs."

I'm increasingly of the opinion that wedding comms, data storage, and compute within a single envelope, and specifically one controlled by third parties (known and otherwise) with intents adversarial to yourself ... was a cardinal error.

A largely-featureless dumbphone (Light Phone ... seems about right), either capable itself of tethering or with an additional data-only tether (making burnering all the more viable), seems best.

An Actual Compute Device of some description --- laptop, small-form-factor computer, very possibly a tablet or e-ink device (though most of these are effectively identical with smartphones, and share all their disadvantages, including short useful life) --- for Actual Compute Tasks, would round that out.

I'm also increasingly of the view that using phones for voice comms is also a nonstarter given spam and privacy violations. Good alternatives are not immediately obvious, though F/OSS voice chat / meeting tools (e.g., Jitsi) seem promising.

There are many things in play here.

1. Platforms only ever allow one version of an app to exist, and its requirements can only reasonably go up. (e.g.: want to use the new Swift feature? you need to target iOSN+1)

2. Most apps now have cloud components. Maintaining old version with evolving backend APIs is a huge pain. One could of course version their API and keep the old version working for a long time.

3. User expectations have changed, if you haven't updated your perfectly working app in 6 months, they consider it dead and move (I don't get this, but it does happen).

4. Tons of apps are made by small teams or even single people. Maintaining a version that is compatible with all devices is a soul-crushing job. This is also why apps from gigantic corporations usually have better old device support. If 1% of your users is 100k+ people, it's way more lucrative to keep them happy.

Apple has been iTempting me but I've resisted simply because on the pixels I can run grapheneOS well beyond what google commits to in terms of updates.

I also like kiwi browser and it's support for chrome extensions.

Regardless, I miss the days when we had more mobile OS diversity. IOS, android, windows phone, BBos, and palms WebOS.

I thought GrapheneOS specifically drops support for devices once Google does - they even mention on their FAQ* that the Pixel 4/XL is only still getting releases as a stopgap for users until they can go buy a newer device.

* https://grapheneos.org/faq

Well I'll be damned. Forgot about that one. Thanks for letting me know!

Though they will still be realesing new Android versions, even if the device is on extended security support.

that matters with the Pixel 6 and 7 series that have such a long security support cycle, but a rather short feature support cycle.

I miss Windows Phone. IMHO one of the few hardware items MS did right.

I really feel the complaint about the ever increasing physical size of phones. On the one hand I appreciate more battery life, but I have big hands and holding the “small” models is annoying compared to the old form factor :-/

i cant understand that. im probably going to be getting a new phone in about a year (still on my S9) and i like some of the features of the galaxy ultra or the iphone pro max but i do not need a phablet sized phone.

to be honest if they really want to increase the size of the battery a bit they could make the phones just a little thicker. i hate the whole camera notch sticking out thing so how about we just make the phones a little thicker and remove the camera notch entirely

"I cant understand that" - typo here? It sounds like you're agreeing with me completely. We both know we'll eventually need a new phone, and that new phone will be bigger because there is no option to not get an ever more phablet-like device.

And yeah, saving a half mm of "thickness" over most of the phone is just dumb. I would absolutely take more battery life and a phone that doesn't rock without a case :-/

I convinced my entire family to move from Verizon to AT&T because their open device policy meant we could buy the phones we wanted online and save money. Two years later AT&T went to a whitelist model that meant half our phones would no longer be compatible with the network. I had to give up a phone I adored, my OnePlus 6. Probably the last phone OnePlus ever released that still reflected the desires of their customers, with a headphone jack, flat screen, alert slider, and rear-mounted fingerprint reader that was a godsend when everybody else was struggling to use face unlock without taking their masks off.

The sad part of this article is that the author seems to be bound with iOS, not even considering Android. They might be trapped in the Apple ecosystem :( That said, I know this is the same thing with Google Suite...

I mean, it's worse on Android. I have a Pixel 4, and it stopped even receiving security updates this past October, at the ripe old age of three years old.

Fortunately I can still run all the apps I want to run, everything works, and performance is good, but I don't imagine that will still be the case if I try to keep using it another three years. And that's ignoring the fact that no new security issues will get patched, and I won't get any new OS-level features.

I've accepted this, and will likely reluctantly buy a Pixel 7a when it's released, even if that phone is even larger and more unwieldy than my Pixel 4, and has the ridiculously-ugly camera bar on the back.

I'm in the same boat - bought the iPhone SE 2016 4 years ago for the form factor, haven't seen anything similar since. I haven't had many compatibility issues though I'm sure that's likely to change.

There was a page generating interest for a small Android phone, looks like the project is underway.

https://smallandroidphone.com/

I have a 2016 Galaxy S7 I won't part with, because it is the last flagship Samsung phone with a 16:9 screen, at a reasonable 5-inch diagonal width.

Every phone since then (from every OEM) has been a narrow 18:9/21:9 monstrosity where your navigating thumb cannot reach the top of the screen.

There was no reason to switch away from 16:9, except for one: to make endless scrolling the default use case.

Between "iOS" and "System Data" my original 16GB SE doesn't have enough space to do an OS update even if I uninstall every last app on it. My 3rd gen Apple Watch is also full of "other" and will need to be factory reset and re-paired again to keep going.

Apple know they're ruining old devices by not cleaning up temp files, they just don't care.

Perhaps I am alone here but I yearn for the fingerprint reader on the iPhone. I can't get used to the new swipeUI

Radical approach: don't consume content on your phone.

Not going to work for many, but it is viable to a growing contingent.

The only real way to address this is for Apple to open up the platform and allow us to install what we want.

I just completed a 5 year phone leap. (7+ to 14+). And even that was more of a case of want rather than need. Mostly the camera which motivated it.

So I’d say they’re doing pretty good on this topic. Keeping a smartphone much longer than 5 is questionable on a hardware level given advances

This for me is making up justifications after the fact.

I only buy new phone after they actually die (get stolen, lost,..), and see no reason to ever change that, even with a few more ms, or not being able use the very latest app of whatever.

It shouldn't be surprising that quality of life decreases as hardware ages.

Hardware gets faster, software gets slower, speed for the users stays about the same. If you're not making your hardware faster (upgrading your phone every few years), then the software is getting slower resulting in a worse experience.

This isn't at all limited to phones. It applies to any hardware/software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

Reply on news.ycombinator.com