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.
>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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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’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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...
I'm preferring offline more and more.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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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.
Aren’t a lot of apps just running JavaScript (ahem, React “Native”)?
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.
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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.
... 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.
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.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/storage/adoptable
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.
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.
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 force upgraded to iPhone 13 a few months after it came out, once the leaks confirmed that that 14 wouldn’t have TouchID.
I feel so very fortunate that this isn't true in my area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a game developer that barely raised $1m for the first title?
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
That's the main reason I'm using a 5 year old phone.
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.