Why does some smartphones get slower with time? Is it a hardware or a software problem?
In: Engineering
Both. The issue is your aging hardware keeping up with your constantly advancing software. Hardware is designed with current cutting edge technology and software develops at a much higher rate than is sustainable for hardware. If hardware upgrades kept pace with software you would be buying a new phone every few weeks.
It helps to think of your smartphone as the tiny computer that it essentially is. If you have a laptop or desktop then you are able to upgrade virtually every component to a certain extent. Depending on how much money you were willing to spend you can update a computer for years by upgrading the processor, RAM, graphics card, hard drive, etc. to keep up with the ever increasing demand of evolving software. You aren’t able to do this with a phone so the hardware gets continually bogged down with every software update and even with app updates.
There have been several attempts to design and market modular phones that have upgrade-able hardware but none have ever taken off, which is a shame. Imagine if instead of buying the newest $1200 phone you could upgrade it with a $100 processor. Or if you were really in to taking pictures you could upgrade to the newest camera for a couple hundred dollars. Every few years you would have a completely new phone after replacing it a few parts at a time. You might still spend a thousand dollars on a new phone but it would be customer optioned and you would upgrade as needed just like a computer.
As for the whole battery “conspiracy” “non-conspiracy” thing, both sides are a little bit right. Yes software upgrades do affect battery life and companies do throttle the battery and the software for efficiency. That is an absolute necessity for older phones with newer software if you care at all about performance or even having a usable phone in some cases. However, planned obsolescence is very much a thing that has been happening for decades across all technology. One of the oldest and perhaps most well known cases being the [Phoebus cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel) which is the reason that, to this day, incandescent light bulbs have a 1,000 hour lifespan.
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