Restoring Performance Galaxy S5 SM-G900V

cmayo said:

My seven-year-old Galaxy S5 (Android 6.0.1) would be perfectly adequate for my needs if it still ran like it did when new, but for the past couple of years, it's been running very, very slowly, almost to the point of being non-responsive. Running an app killer will restore performance for a little while but when I pick it up an hour or two later, it's nearly comatose again.

I've heard tales of Apple intentionally crippling older phones; does that happen with older Samsung Galaxies?

I've looked into rooting the device hoping to strip out all the bloatware but have never found a root procedure for my S5 SM-G900V. Some S5's seem to be rootable but my model was always a problem, and I don't know if rooting would help anyway.

I suspect I'm just stuck with it but wanted to ask here if anyone had any ideas for squeezing a few more years use out of this phone. Upgrading to a new flagship is out of the question for me, though I could probably manage a lower-range phone like a Straight Talk A32 if I knew I'd be any better off.

Any helpful thoughts?

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Hadron said:

Apple's "intentional crippling" was always described as an attempt to extend the life of a failing battery by reducing peak performance - I can't tell you whether that's true or not (companies never admit to bad behaviour), but it's not completely implausible as a motivation. Of course giving people a "battery saving mode" that they could choose to turn on would be a better solution, but Apple do tend towards paternalism.

I've no reason to believe that Samsung deliberately reduce the performance of their phones, but there are several factors to consider here:
1) you are now running Android 6, which is a heavier OS than the Android 4.4 that phone was released with
2) apps have spent the intervening years getting bigger and more resource-hungry, no matter what OS you are running
3) Samsung's "TouchWiz" software never had the reputation of being the best optimised
4) how is your battery? If that is weakening (or is already a lower-quality replacement) it's not impossible that is a factor

So what can you do? I'd not bother with task killers. It might be that you could improve things by cleaning out some of the crud, including wiping the system cache from recovery mode or even backing up, doing a factory reset and only reinstalling what you need (a factory reset will do nothing to the operating system, but will clear out old data that have been left cluttering up the space). If your phone was rootable then installing a lighter custom ROM might help, but a Verizon model will be the most locked-down version there was back in 2014 so I can quite believe that isn't possible (sadly VZW also had the worst reputation for adding bloatware, which Samsung didn't exactly skimp on themselves). I don't think you'll be able to roll it back to the earlier firmware, but I'd not recommend that anyway: you are likely to hit problems with apps no longer working on 4.4 (actually there will already be apps that don't work on 6, and at some point that may force you to look at a newer phone no matter what else you do).

So what would I do? I'd consider a reset, I'd certainly go through disabling any pre-installed app I was able to and which I didn't need (make sure you know what they actually do first, but it shouldn't let you disable things that would actually break the phone). I'd probably uninstall unnecessary user apps as well. If you have been moving apps to SD that won't improve performance, though if it's the old Android 2 style move to SD that would mainly affect load times (the "adoptive storage" introduced in Android 6, but which Samsung exclude from most of their phones, can slow things more noticeably). And maybe look for lighter-weight versions of apps (modern versions of things like browsers can be very large indeed).

And having done that I'd see whether the result was tolerable, or whether it was time to buy a new phone.

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svim said:

I would focus more on getting a new or newer phone than on pointless conspiracy matters -- i.e. the Apple incident was a very selective one and just old news, not unlike the silly rumors about Samsung is failing because of its Note 7 battery incident (i.e. smartphones are just a small part of its business and it's still selling the largest market share of phones). Also a selective matter and old news.
But here in the real world, it's still a matter where a dated phone like your S5 has just aged to the point where its usability has diminished. Google stopped supporting it a long time ago, most app developers too so even the apps on it are in question, and basically there are hardware limitations that will make even third-party ROMs more about just having a phone that boots up than a phone that's actually usable as a daily usage phone again.
Today's Internet has devolved into a toxic mix of really useful online services and countless compromises so using any outdated mobile device involves an increased amount of risk. Keep that in mind as you want to keep using your S5, and be extra careful about anything and everything you do online.
As for getting another Samsung phone as an upgrade, Samsung does make some really good hardware, and some of the alterations it makes to the base Android operating system it installs on its products appeal to a lot of people, but there's also a lot of Samsung branding that adds a lot of bloat too. Buy another Samsung because you want to stay within Samsung's oversight, but I'd suggest you look into something like a Pixel phone for a clean Android device, or a OnePlus or Moto phone that will be have a minimum amount of added cruft and bloat. There are plenty of good, usable, reliable phones that aren't flagship models.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-budget-android-phone/

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