Reddit seems to have found out why iPhones slow down over the years

iPhone users have long suspected that their devices get slower over time. Users put it down to the inclusion of new features that bog down the device.

However, now, Reddit users and Geekbench developer John Poole have come up with a more interesting reason for this theory. They say that iPhones reduce the performance level of their devices so it can better preserve the battery life of the devices. This is because the battery keeps degrading with each passing day.

How did this theory about the iPhones begin?

A Reddit individual who goes under the name TechFire brought this to light. He posted a report on the iPhone subreddit. His iPhone was running quite slow with low benchmarks. However, after he replaced the battery, the benchmark results shot up. His theory is that Apple slows down the performance to increase the battery life of the device.

What really shot up interest in the area was a blog post by John Poole, who is the founder of Geekbench. He says this behaviour was only present on 10.2.1 and not on editions before that. While it might be a coincidence, this new behaviour might be because of an earlier issue that plagued iPhones. This issue caused shut down unexpectedly as the battery reduced. The update 10.2.1 fixed this issue.

Back in February, Apple described their process to TechCrunch. An excerpt of that is given below.

With iOS 10.2.1, Apple made improvements to reduce occurrences of unexpected shutdowns that a small number of users were experiencing with their iPhone. iOS 10.2.1 already has over 50% of active iOS devices upgraded, and the diagnostic data we’ve received from upgraders shows that, for this small percentage of users experiencing the issue, we’re seeing a more than 80% reduction in iPhone 6s and over 70% reduction on iPhone 6 of devices unexpectedly shutting down.

Poole found the same behaviour in the iPhone 7 too. But it has one major difference. In the iPhone 7, this behaviour kick in only after the update to iOS 11.2.0.