[kowbell]

I had an S5 too, and actually still have it in case I ever need a backup (e.g. last week when _my_ Pixel started getting caught in an infinite boot loop!) Though I hadn't noticed the S5 being destroyed by software updates - the only reason I stopped using it is because they stopped updating it and it was locked from custom ROMs, which was a sad conclusion because it had still decent hardware. Could you elaborate on the villainous updates you encountered?

[hvindin]

My personal S5 experience leads me to believe that there was some trickery afoot from Samsung's end.

When I realised that my S5 was starting to get a little bit dodgy (having owned it from April 2011 until around December 2018) I went and bought 8 of them. Surprisingly, they were still available for purchase on the Samsung website over 7 years after they were originally released, although they quickly ran out of stock and I needed to go trawling through mobile phone stores asking them to check their store rooms.

From here I noticed that every time I updated my phone to the latest software version, deleted all the extraneous bloatware that actually made no sense to have pre-installed, and go to using a device: it would start to behave weirdly within weeks. Apps that had previously run just fine (like, as an example, google maps) were laggy and constantly crashed.

After going through 6 of the 8 phones in just over 3 months (the rate of failure seemed to have more to do with the fact that they were S5's in 2019 than anything I was doing to them) I eventually just gave up and bought an S10+ (because I honestly just wanted to see what the hell one would do with a terabyte of Storage on their phone - turns out it's absolutely nothing, but the possibilities initially intrigued me, but I guess I'm not really creative enough to come up with something worth doing with all that storage space).

Now I'm still bitterly using the aforementioned S10+ waiting for someone to release a phone that I perceive to be as good as the S5....

So no hard data, just my experience with a large amount of S5's that all seemed to become unusable based on the date rather than actually being broken....

[skylanh]

There are recent updates from LineageOS for the S5 (multiple variants).

https://download.lineageos.org/

[DrScump]

Unless you got an exceptional price for those GS5s, I'm missing why you prioritized that particular model, which was five generations old by 2018.

I had two. One bought new, one bought off Ebay. Never had trouble with either, but I had abandoned them by 2016ish. I rooted one (to get around mobile hotspot limits), later unrooting it when Tmobile stopped treating tethering/hotspot punitively.

The GS5 was the last of the line with removable battery. The GS6 was the last with an IR port.

One impressive aspect of the Galaxy S has, for me, been reliability. Mine have dropped to hard surfaces many, many times with no damage (aside from cracked glass, with which it still performs fine).

[trashface]

Anecdata, but my S5 is still working after...6-7 years I guess. My brother also has one and his works. My charging port broke so I have to remove the battery to charge it, but I have three batteries that I rotate between so this isn't a big deal. However it hasn't received a software update since 2017 (I am on T Mobile), so there are probably all kinds of security issues lurking.

It will, however, be the last Samsung phone I buy.

[mikelward]

I had the same happen on my Nexus 7, after aggressively disabling apps, including things like the Google app.

[MikusR]

It's the Google services that do the slowing down.