I have an old Android tablet, a Nexus 7 from 2012, that I haven’t really used in a long time. I’ve played a few games on it, but I mainly used it for reading comics and doing Duolingo lessons, and I was thinking of doing Duolingo again, so I dusted it off and fired it up again.
The first problem was obvious: it felt sluggish. I had no idea how much crud it had accumulated over time, so I did a factory reset on it to wipe everything out and start fresh.
This led directly to the second problem: it’s old. It was still running Android 4.4.4, and when I went to reinstall apps, a ton of them simply no longer offered installs that would still run on a version this old. I was using some of those apps before, but since I just wiped it, it no longer had the versions I’d installed years ago. The tablet can support 5.1, but when I tried upgrading way back when it first came out, performance was pretty poor and I rolled it back to 4.4.4 and kept it there ever since.
Even with it still on the older version of Android and a fresh reset, it was starting to feel sluggish again, though. It’s not just the operating system itself; the built-in Google apps also get updated and it seems like they’ve bloated enough over time that they just don’t run well on older hardware. So, if it was going to run sluggishly anyway, I figured that I may as well just re-upgrade to Android 5.1.
That solved the app availability problem, as a lot more of them were now available to install, but unfortunately it’s made the performance problems far worse. From hitting the power button to wake it up, it can take 10 seconds or more for the screen to come on. Typing in the PIN, it’s often a second until it acknowledges a tap. It can take another 20 or more seconds for the home screen to appear. Opening the Google Play store can take several minutes, punctuated by being prompted several times “This app isn’t responding, do you want to wait or close it?” Updating an app can take several minutes, even for small apps. Trying to scroll through lists can take a few seconds just for it to respond to the swipe gesture, and scrolls in jarring jumps instead of smoothly. Some of this happened with 4.4.4 as well, but it’s even worse now.
It’s just not usable anymore, for anything, really. My options are to just try and live with that, or revert it back to 4.4.4 again and live with it being sluggish-but-slightly-less-so and fewer apps available. Or, well, an iPad starts to look awfully tempting… It’s just a shame that it feels like a piece of tech from 2012 should at least still be practically useful for something.
And, as I’m typing this, my latest attempt to update apps just ended with:
I’m having similar issues with a first-gen iPad Mini I inherited from a family member.
I was so excited to have an iOS device to run some very specific apps on which aren’t available on Android or MacOS. Nope. The iPad stopped getting iOS updates after 9.6.3 and, at the barest minimum, I need 10 for the apps I want.
So, it’s basically useless to me – or anyone else – because the only apps which will run on it are the ones installed with a fresh wipe and reinstall. Safari? No thanks.