Comment on Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That)
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can’t update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn’t for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.
I wish Android was more like Debian where it’s lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.
FrameXX@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably esoecially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.
When we get to the manufacturer’s custom skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.