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by compounding_it 27 days ago
I have been thinking about this for some time now. There is no doubt this happens. My moms iPhone 11 is on iOS 26 and over the last 2 OS updates, its reached that exact point where it is 'glitching' like the twitter video says. Now that it won't get a new update this year it seems it requires an upgrade, not from new features, but from the existing ones no longer functioning efficiently.

My theory is that the 'malware' is simply heavier updates on older phones that don't really need it. For example the camera app in iOS26 could be significantly slower than in iOS 15 for example. It may do a few extra things but it could do them just as well on the older code base. Now with the new code base, the exact same feature runs slower on an old phone but runs the same on a newer phone with a relative difference noticeable.

This is probably because Apple hardware team is far ahead of the software team. There is a lot of headroom, and instead of doing something innovative with it, apple choses to instead just bloat it to sell more phones.

Apple with this strategy becomes the most environmentally unhealthy company. Of course we need a way to prove this.

What I would do is get an iPhone 12 with iOS 14 to iOS 27 and compare how fluid and snappy the UI is. its probably hard to get an iPhone with iOS 14 because apple cleverly doesnt sign it.
2 comments
microtonal 27 days ago
Apple with this strategy becomes the most environmentally unhealthy company. Of course we need a way to prove this.

Ehm, talk to all the Android vendors who stopped doing security updates after 1-2 years or are only doing security updates every 3-6 months (which is certainly not safe with the current vulnerability rate). New EU regulations are moving them for long support periods. Funnily enough, some of them think they can do some malicious compliance by never releasing any updates at all:

https://www.androidauthority.com/motorola-eu-software-update...

My mom still has an iPhone 11 or 12 and it's definitely running better than Android phones 2019 or 2020. Not only that, it is also still getting security updates.

(Credits go to Google Pixel and a lesser extend Samsung S-series for showing the way when it comes to Android updates.)

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tristanj 27 days ago
Have you considered that the iPhone 11 is just old, and not powerful enough to run modern software? The iPhone 11 was released 7 years ago and is old by smartphone standards. A new iPhone 18 has 2.5x the performance of an iPhone 11. Smartphones are one of the very few aspects in life that improve exponentially year over year.
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compounding_it 27 days ago
>A new iPhone 18 has 2.5x the performance of an iPhone 11.

But we are talking about something as simple as opening safari and camera app. How does that glitch and require 2.5x the performance 7 years later with no hardware changes whatsoever to the camera and network/ssd/display etc.

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tristanj 27 days ago
Both apps you mentioned (safari and camera) have been almost completely rewritten in the past few years. The software is designed, written, and tested on latest generation hardware. It is then backported to older devices. Apple developers don't daily-drive 7 year old devices, they don't encounter this sluggishness and have little incentive to optimize old devices.

The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.

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fsflover 26 days ago
Why didn't the same happen with Firefox or Chrome? They still work fine on older devices.
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tristanj 26 days ago
Both of those apps feel slower, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.

Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.

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fsflover 26 days ago
It hasn't happened to Firefox. Sent from desktop Firefox running on my GNU/Linux phone announced in 2017.
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