I run a Samsung S-3 Note as my personal phone. I've had this older "phablet" for over a year, and was somewhat surprised that Verizon offered me an upgrade to Android 5.0 about two months ago. My older S-2 had to soldier on with various versions of Android 3.x, the last update being offered when that device was only two months old, back in 2012 IIRC. Surprising that Verizon/Samsung would offer the current S-4, S-5 and S-6 operating system for my old turkey....
I accepted the update, and it installed itself as it was supposed to.
Shortly after that upload, Facebook made a major change, and the formerly fast social medium now bogs badly, even when my phone tells me that Verizon's LTE Gen4 is running at 25 mbps+ or I am on my Comcrap home system at 56 mbps. Email loading has slowed down significantly as well. Sometimes the FB & Email downloads "pout" so badly that I just reboot the phone, which momentarily speeds things up, but only for about 15 seconds or so. The new O/S also does a lousy job of synching my devices across the Google spectrum, another data-intensive network. The synching system used to perform flawlessly with 4.x
In the old 4.4 O/S on my S-3, everything ran fine, ran fast, as a device of this capability ought to. That all ended with Android 5.0.
Consider Verizon Wireless' customer relations pickle at the time 5.0 was introduced: Power users were getting "throttled" after using only 2gb of their data allotments, and some of us had real, by-God Unlimited data, a plan left over from several years back and phones like the Samsung Sch-I760. Verizon got into a bandwidth-delivery crunch because their sales, of bandwidth-hungry Apple devices mostly, outstripped their systems' ability to deliver the bandwidth. The mega-company solved this problem by "throttling", or deliberately slowing down data delivery to speeds below 1 mbps for the older Samsung devices. Instead of asking the forbearance of customers, and promising a new, speedy system by a date certain, Verizon tried to hide the throttling, and they got taken to the cleaners for it. The other services' ad campaigns hammered VZW mercilessly for their shady tricks, and VZW lost market share.
Rock and a hard place time, and my theory of what happened next:
Verizon, awash in cash but not in network, decided to substitute moolah for bandwidth. They go to Google, cross their palm, and THAT screw-everybody company obliges by writing a new O/S, which, without any notice, has built-in throttling, along with a few new widgets which are supposed to amaze us. Google, with likely a wink and a nod from Samsung, pushes out the new O/S, and Verizon does everybody a faux-solid by going way back and pushing it to earlier devices.
The result of all this is that my original smartphone, an Sch-I730, which ran Windows Mobile 6.0, was faster than the latest and greatest from Samsung. What proves it for me is that Verizon's equipment allows a burst of high-speed data when the phone first boots, then it is throttled.
Do any readers out their have the same issues?
What would happen if I reverted?
If I "rooted" & became a Super User, could I tweak up the speed of my Android 5.0?
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