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by serial_dev 36 days ago
Your experiment would not prove that they are deliberately slowing older phones via updates. That's big part of the claim. Your experiment would only show that as you update, your old phones will get slower and slower.

I wouldn't be surprised older phones get slower with updates, in fact, that feels like the most likely scenario for me, based on my experience as a software developer.

But IMO, Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies. Most likely, the teams just need to ship features, make fixes, and they mostly test on higher end, recent devices. Sure, at some point, someone tests on a lower end device that everything still works, but they probably either do not notice the issues, or shrug it off, or rationalize it (it might make x worse, but users get y in exchange, so it's fine).
1 comments
throwwwll 35 days ago
> would not prove that they are deliberately slowing older phones

> Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies

peak "Leave the multi-trillion corporation alone"

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serial_dev 35 days ago
I'm not saying that they definitely did not do it on purpose, it's possible, I am saying that a simple with/without updates check doesn't prove they did it on purpose.

In my own experience, newer products get more love automatically, because the testers, the devs, the team are on newer devices. Perf regressions are also harder to catch than simpler bugs and sometimes require extended usage to notice smaller perf degradation, and devs and QA do not really test like that (often enough).

The way I see it, older products will naturally decline with updates, as they are less of a focus while validating a new release. Sure, they get some "freebie" improvements, but I'm guessing the accidental "decay" outweighs any improvements.

I'm not saying they couldn't make it on purpose. I'm saying that (IMO) it's more likely that it gets worse with every update even without malicious, conniving people trying to get you to upgrade by worsening your OS.

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throwwwll 23 days ago
I do say they did it on purpose. And they did. Thank you for attention to this matter.
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