Samsung slowing phones down!

[FatRakoon]

I have been a fairly rock steady Samsung fan for many many years now.

I think when they brought out the ACE, taht was my first "Big phone" LOL

I have since had, among others, the S3, S5, Note 3, I tried the S7 & S7 edge, but they were not as good as the Note 3, I went Note 5 but the battery lasted about 15 minutes ( No kidding it was beyond disgusting - Even with a Battery booster back pack, I could still not listen to a full album before it ate both the bettery and booster ) I then went for the Note 7 but that never happened, I eventually went for the Note 8 and for the most part, I have been happy with that. I recently bought the S9+ and that was nice, but since I got my daughter an iphone X and my eldest son a Motorola P30, the wife told me to give our youngest son the S9 - Cow.

Last year I dropped it and had it reparied at the low low price of £340 but ever since then, the screen has a blind spot where it does not know that I am touching it, although it looks fine, and it seems to randomly decide whether to see the network or not!

But ok, thats a bit of a pain in the ass, but even then, its something that was originally caused by physically dammaging the phone.

Where I am gettign angry is in something else...

While the note 8 was beign repaired, I went back to the Note 3.

I had not used it for a while and as such I let my kids play with it... They looked after it of course, theyu are grown up now and when I nabbed it back , I reset the phone and aded my accounts to it blah blah and I noticed how slow it was... It was not just slow because I went from a note 8 to the Noite 3, it was actually slow because it was struggling to accept my kepresses. I could not type anywhere near the number of presses that I used to do with it, this is not me, the note had definitely slowed down.

Now, going back a short while ago, my Tab 3 also did the exact same thing, but that was an update that did that... I was using it just fine one day, it asked about an update and so I said OVERNIGHT and the next day it was so slow, that I stopped using it, and eventually I gave it away.

Now, I know that phone companies do this, but this has now happened to me twice, and its not like they were slowing down really slowly, they were having massive slowdowns, that were so obvious.

So, I have decided that a company that does that, is simply no longer worthy of my cash.

I like the P30, its quick as hell, but my son has that.
I may opt for the MATE I dont know, I might just give the whole rotten thing a miss and use one of the other spare phones I have... Windows, Blackberry etc, as much as I despise them, they have not slowed down so obviously, as the Samsungs have done.

Either way, I am not going to waste money on samsung again. Not much of a threat to such a massive company, but hey ho.

 

[Puzzled]

Not sure that's a Samsung thing but rather Android in general.

I still use a HTC One M8 which used to be a really snappy phone with no pauses when loading apps. Now I need to wait for the keyboard to appear and there is a delay when typing, apps also freeze a lot and the whole experience is pretty frustrating.

Think it's just a mix of battery degradation and apps / websites requiring more performance as they've been updated. A factory reset made the phone noticeable faster but doesn't take long for it to slow down again.

 

[FishLicker]

M8 owner here, mine is still nippy-ish but I’ve flashed LineageOS onto it! One reason though for the slowdown along with the common updates one is the storage deteriorating by all accounts, it slows down your phone. It’s most likely to be an update though - the hardware requirements will surely go up slightly with each new release.

 

[Shocky-FM]

? Run a benchmark and compare your performance to what your device should score, it's such an easy thing to confirm.

FYI - Samsung don't officially lower performance, neither do any Android manufacturers as this is frowned upon, the only company that openly does this is Apple.

 

[VortexA1]

What happens is that the later android versions use more resources and it can slow older phones down. I read ages ago there's a lot going for keeping an older android version on your aging phone but keeping up with security updates however.

 

[chroniclard]

Happens on iPhone, Android, Windows, whatever. Some of our older devices (iPads, various Android tablets) are almost unusable now.

 

[Puzzled]

M8 owner here, mine is still nippy-ish but I’ve flashed LineageOS onto it! One reason though for the slowdown along with the common updates one is the storage deteriorating by all accounts, it slows down your phone. It’s most likely to be an update though - the hardware requirements will surely go up slightly with each new release.

Will have to look at that, is OS 16 the latest?

Saying that the battery is still knackered and reading online its a real pain to change as the phone is glued together so looking to upgrade anyway but still be interesting to see how it runs.

One thing I didn't really think about until using someones old laptop without an adblocker was just how much of a performance hit websites can have on a system, the amount of junk and ads running on them can cause older hardware to slow down to a crawl.

 

[Randomface74]

What happens is that the later android versions use more resources and it can slow older phones down. I read ages ago there's a lot going for keeping an older android version on your aging phone but keeping up with security updates however.

how do you do this? don't new versions just install automatically? are security updates actually available for older versions?

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

It depends a lot on the mAh as well. My Samsung A70 has a 4500 mAh, and running it down from 75% to 9% gave me 3 days and 2 hours. A full charge 100% to 0% might even be 4 days but haven't tested that yet

 

[VortexA1]

how do you do this? don't new versions just install automatically? are security updates actually available for older versions?

in general, an Android phone won't get any more security updates if it's more than three years old, and that's provided it can even get all the updates before then.

Off Google.

Regarding the note 3. I have that too and every now and then try it out. I think a previous comment about the storage speed degradation is probably also one of the (at least) few reasons for really slow /bad performance.

 

[Rroff]

I still have a Note 1 on a fairly old version of Android knocking about due to an eMMC brick bug it is hugely risky to update it - one of the reasons I upgraded - it is considerably faster/snappier than people who still have Note 1s with more upto date firmware/OS installs for whatever reason - whether that really is due to more recent versions of the OS/Software being more performance demanding who knows.

 

[Richy888]

how do you do this? don't new versions just install automatically? are security updates actually available for older versions?

As far as Samsung goes then I don't think you can split OS updates from security updates?

 

[kona786]

As far as Samsung goes then I don't think you can split OS updates from security updates?

Correct.

Google should have it updated through the play store across all devices. I think that is their plan for the future.

 

[edscdk]

these are smart people im sure its done on purpose....

just tweak to the code so it needs (on average) more L1/L2 cache (more than the device has)... cpu usage / ram usage still look the same but everything run slower

or tweak to APIs so more ram happens to get used... one small OS tweak for "security" reason and every app uses 10% more ram... or has to keep hitting main memory as the code did not fit in l1 cache

 

[Shocky-FM]

Happens on iPhone, Android, Windows, whatever. Some of our older devices (iPads, various Android tablets) are almost unusable now.

Rubbish, Apple downclock devices purposely to conserve battery life, that's a fact, they literally downclock older devices.

Android manufacturers do not, is it possible updates can slow down older devices? sure but to claim it's intentional or that this always happens with updates is nonsense.

My OnePlus 3 from 2016 and Pixel C from 2015 still perform great minus a few battery issues. Both still feel snappy and benchmark numbers are exactly as you would expect.

Even my Shield TV from 2015 still performs great.

 

[chroniclard]

Rubbish, Apple downclock devices purposely to conserve battery life, that's a fact, they literally downclock older devices.

Android manufacturers do not, is it possible updates can slow down older devices? sure but to claim it's intentional or that this always happens with updates is nonsense.

My OnePlus 3 from 2016 and Pixel C from 2015 still perform great minus a few battery issues. Both still feel snappy and benchmark numbers are exactly as you would expect.

Even my Shield TV from 2015 still performs great.

Didnt claim it was intentional, just that it happens all the time on lots of platforms due to software updates and more and more features.

Probably not as noticeable these days due to improvements in storage speeds and cpu speeds/multi cores. Certainly was an issue with many older devices.

 

[Shocky-FM]

Didnt claim it was intentional, just that it happens all the time on lots of platforms due to software updates and more and more features.

Probably not as noticeable these days due to improvements in storage speeds and cpu speeds/multi cores. Certainly was an issue with many older devices.

With older pre-UFS devices the NAND was slow to start with and degraded quite a bit, but we are talking about phones older than 2015. They still degrade of course, but they should last years without any noticeable issues, especially considering internal storage these days is pretty snappy.

Another thing worth pointing out, if you come back to an old device it will always feel slower because you've been spoiled by quicker devices, it's like returning to a game you played years ago and being disappeared because it's not quite what you remembered.

 

[mrochester]

Rubbish, Apple downclock devices purposely to conserve battery life, that's a fact, they literally downclock older devices.

Android manufacturers do not, is it possible updates can slow down older devices? sure but to claim it's intentional or that this always happens with updates is nonsense.

My OnePlus 3 from 2016 and Pixel C from 2015 still perform great minus a few battery issues. Both still feel snappy and benchmark numbers are exactly as you would expect.

Even my Shield TV from 2015 still performs great.

Apple don’t downclock ‘older devices’, they downclock devices that have a battery that has degraded to a point where it can’t support maximum CPU speed. That may be a 3 year old phone, it might be a 1 year old phone. The age is irrelevant.

 

[Shocky-FM]

Apple don’t downclock ‘older devices’, they downclock devices that have a battery that has degraded to a point where it can’t support maximum CPU speed. That may be a 3 year old phone, it might be a 1 year old phone. The age is irrelevant.

Safe to assume that most phones with a degraded battery are older devices though, and vice versa?

I agree it could be a 1 year old device, it's just less likely.

 

[mrochester]

Safe to assume that most phones with a degraded battery are older devices though, and vice versa?

I agree it could be a 1 year old device, it's just less likely.

More likely to be an older device, but if you’ve used a phone in the desert every day or subjected it to other extremes then it could be a relatively young device.