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On slower phones.

2020-09-11

A few weeks ago our house was robbed, luckily no one was hurt but we lost a bunch of stuff. One of those stuff was my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, it was a decent phone that did the job well and I liked it for that. It's relatively old now but it still performed well for what I was using it for. But now that was gone I had to make do with something less.

Around november last year, my professor and I were chatting in our office and I briefly mentioned about how I saw this cheap deal on an old phone that, I believed, to be still powerful today. It was this Samsung Galaxy S3 that I found to be selling around 2000 pesos in an online website. Somehow I got her interest and she told me that she would be interested in buying one as well and that I should order one. Well, I did.

When it arrived a week later and I gave her her S3, she handed me 4000 pesos. I was baffled at that moment and I quickly returned half of it but she insisted. Apparently it was her birthday gift for me.

With my S6 Edge gone, I was forced to use this 2012 Galaxy phone. Personally, my whole intent in buying this phone was just to house a Free Software offshoot of Android called Replicant. I did that and wasn't really particularly impressed on its performance and it rubbed too much on the inconvenience side and was just barely usable for me. So now that the S3's my main phone, Replicant had to go. I looked around for a compiled build of LineageOS 16 for the S3 as it's not maintained anymore by the LineageOS people. At this point, I was also already mulling over the idea of compiling my own build. But that would require time, storage space and patience all of which I lack then. I need a phone that works and I need it now.

It didn't took me long to load a precompiled ROM of LineageOS 16 for the S3 but then it is from this point on that I had to deal with the sheer lack of performance of the S3. Prior to me using LineageOS on this phone, the only thing that it ran was the stock ROM and Replicant. I didn't really spent much time using the stock ROM so I didn't really knew how fast it was using that and the Replicant experience was atrocious. But when I loaded LineageOS 16, the phone just went flat on its face and crawled. It's slow and there's no hiding it.

But I'm not going to back out of this now and used it and until now I've been using that installation of LineageOS and while the performance wasn't buttery smooth I was surprised at how this phone can still manage to load a relatively new android operating system. For a phone that's been around since 2012, it's a testament at how good it is to be able to run Android 9. Or, perhaps, it's a statement at how bloated the Android operating system had become over the years.

In hindsight, I should have loaded a more apt version of LineageOS on this phone. Something around Android 6.0 would probably have fared better than 9. I'll probably do that if I can be bothered.