Some tweaks I made to my Android phone made me wonder about the prevalence of planned obsolescence..

[backscatter712]

Like a lot of people, I have an Android smartphone. Mine's an HTC G2, going through T-Mobile, that I got about a year and a half ago.

Unlike a lot of people, I've hacked the hell out of my phone. It's got a big SD card, and an extended battery that sticks out like a brick from the back of the case and has its own custom battery cover. I've rooted and unlocked it, voided the warranty, and I'm currently running a custom ROM, called CyanogenMod in place of the stock Android software.

Being a bit of geek, I wanted to squeeze more performance out of my phone, and discovered a program called V6 SuperCharger. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=991276/ . This program is not for the faint of heart - you need a rooted phone, there is a small chance of breaking things in the phone, causing reboot loops, and other problems that are difficult to recover from, and in the worst case scenario, you could brick your phone. Furthermore, this program brings out your Android phone's inner Linux - it's not a standard .apk Android app written in Java with a nice pretty GUI that you install from Google Play. It's a UNIX shell script, and it runs in a pocket-sized terminal emulator in plain text. Hope you remember how to use a command line - we're going under the hood!

But for me, this program worked! My phone which previously had an annoying amount of lag, and other glitches, suddenly became snappy, responsive, stable, and awesome.

How does it work? The thread goes into details that may require a Computer Science degree to understand, but essentially, it makes the Linux kernel manage the RAM memory on the phone more aggressively - stopping programs that haven't been used in a while, and are just sitting in memory, taking up space. By freeing up memory, other programs that are in active use run more quickly, the remaining free memory is being used to cache the flash drive & SD card, and in general, the phone runs muuuuuch more smoothly.

Really, it was just a matter of making adjustments to the kernel to get its pre-existing memory manager to do its job better.

So the political question is: Why didn't the manufacturers do this?

Maybe it was just negligence - I've worked in the industry, they've got deadlines, crunch times, stiff competition - they've got to get the new hotness ready and shipped in a hurry, so the engineers probably don't spend too much time on performance optimization.

But here's my other theory. What if I was a more marketing-minded engineer, or manager of engineers, with planned obsolescence in mind? What would be the ideal performance pattern of a phone to entice customers to keep upgrading? Easy. Make the phone snappy, responsive and fast, at first.... Then, a few months down the line, after the user's been installing apps, filling the memory with music, ebooks, video, games, etc. etc. etc., the phone would start slowing down gradually, until about 18 months later, the phone's ridiculously sluggish, it lags, apps crash for no reason (because the memory's full, and apps can't get more memory when they request it), and if you call for help, of course, the poorly trained support guy on the line will give you unhelpful advice like "nuke it and factory-reset it" (which blows away all those apps & data), or even "Say, for the low low price of $150 and another two year contract, we can upgrade you to the new hotness!!!" How would I configure the phone to at first perform well, and then suffer gradual performance degradation? Well, set the kernel to not clean out its RAM very aggressively, so a new phone without a big pile of apps will run well, but then start choking when it's loaded up.

So while it may not be active hostile action that resulted in the software in your phone not operating as well as it's capable of operating, neither HTC or T-Mobile, or any other cell phone manufacturer or carrier is very well motivated to address such problems.

But a few enthusiasts with Android, Linux and programming skills were able to go under the hood, make a few tweaks, and make my "old and busted" phone run like it's brand new!

Don't you love planned obsolescence?

[HiPointDem]

1. i am sure this kind of thing is done, and widely. for a long time.

[Ezlivin]

2. Capitalism requires planned obsolescence

Otherwise we'd buy something, be satisfied and not shop again. We are no longer citizens, we are consumers.

[Brickbat]

3. Congratulations! It looks like you have chosen to swallow the red pill.

[backscatter712]

4. Just tell me I can still eat steaks, and not a bowl of snot...

[Brickbat]

5. It's Tasty Wheat all the way down.

[backscatter712]

6. How did the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like?

Maybe they got it wrong.

Maybe that's why everything tastes like chicken - it's some sort of system default...

[dogknob]

7. Lobotomized Computers are so hip! n/t

All the cool stuff removed.

All the tracking stuff buffed.

You will pry my laptop from my cold, dead hand.

[surrealAmerican]

8. I get what you're saying, and yet ...

... how hardy is the hardware? After all this work, it's still the sort of device that can fall out of your pocket and be completely ruined.

[backscatter712]

10. True enough, but I've had good luck with mine.

My particular phone is pretty solid, and while I heavily use my phone, I don't abuse it, so I haven't done anything like cracking the screen.

I'm sure eventually something will wear out, or I'll drop it in the toilet, or something else will cause it to fail.

But not today!

[boppers]

9. Yeahbutno.

Disclosure: One of the android memory management programmers (and programs, there are several) was in my wedding almost two years ago, and I've known him for 15 years now. We've had this discussion.

Basically, reliability is more important than performance.
Time to market is also more important than performance.

It's a phone.

Application performance is waaaay low on the priority scale.

Also, the OP looks like advertising spam.

[backscatter712]

11. I get what you mean about the OP.

The guy who wrote V6 Supercharger did write it in kind of a bad emulation of marketing copy, so yeah it looks kind of spammy. At the same time, the developer in question is pretty well known in the xda and Android development/hacking communities. And being one who can peek under the hood myself and see exactly how this program works (yes, I'm a Linux nerd myself), I can say that it genuinely works, and the principles behind how it works are solid.

And you made the same point I made - time-to-market and reliability outweigh performance. Programmers are under crunches, they've got to get the product out the door, and they get yelled at when the product is broken, but not so much if it's a little sluggish. I've worked as a software engineer - I've been there.

Of course, this is when the hobbyists and the monomaniacal geeks who do things like work on custom ROMs or play with kernel OOM parameters step in and do what the corporate-employed engineers just don't have the time to do.

[boppers]

12. The OP looks spammy.

Did you write it?

Also, your avatar is wrong for a linux nerd.... daemon is not tux. (Minor nit).