HTC, LG, Samsung, and Motorola have their take on the issue

With Apple being on hot water for what it has been doing to its old iPhones—even reducing the costs of having the batteries replaced by $50, top smartphone brands like HTC, LG, Samsung, and Motorola responded to the issue. Their common statement? That they never slow down phones with degraded batteries.

Their statements are as follows:

HTC: designing phones to slow down their processor as their battery ages “is not something we do.”

Motorola: “We do not throttle CPU performance based on older batteries.”

LG: “Never have, never will! We care what our customers think.”

Samsung: Product quality has been and will always be Samsung Mobile’s top priority. We ensure extended battery life of Samsung mobile devices through multi-layer safety measures, which include software algorithms that govern the battery charging current and charging duration. We do not reduce CPU performance through software updates over the lifecycles of the phone.

While Android smartphones do have a tendency of slowing down as they age, it is more because of their internals being dated, and not because their batteries are not keeping up. Being able to use both Android and iOS for the past eight years, I do notice that random shutdowns happen more often with iOS devices compared to Android devices.

Case in point: Back when I had my Galaxy S3, its battery life was running for around a day even at three years old (before replacing it with a Xperia Z3 Compact). While it was considerably slow because of its dated internals, the phone was still highly usable for my work, even if the processor and RAM have some difficulties keeping up with the pace of the latest apps.

With my iPhone, it was a different story. Back when I was using an iPhone 3GS, I started encountering problems with it during its third year of usage (that’s around 2012), experiencing random reboots and sudden phone shutdowns even when I have around 20-30% juice left in it. Yes, Apple has been plagued with battery problems even way back; it just happens that the issue exploded in a large scale after they have been exposed to their undisclosed practices.

With major Android companies responding to Apple’s power-throttling practices, will this push the Cupertino-based company to innovate further (perhaps putting bigger batteries) with their future iOS devices? We really hope so.

Source: Android Authority, The Verge

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