Have you ever noticed that your phone seems to slow down as a new version releases? Well, it is not a myth, and you are certainly not crazy.

Studies are backing up these claims.

A few years ago, a study was done by a student at Hardford University about the number of worldwide Google searches for the term “iPhone slow”, and she noticed a trend. More searches for “iPhone slow” were found during the times of the releases of each new iPhone, from the 3G to the 5S.
The same research was done for the Samsung Galaxy with the search term “Samsung Galaxy slow”, but the same results were not concluded; the number of times the term was searched did not spike during new releases of the phone.
The same phenomenon can be seen today with the releases of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X through Google Trends.

Here is the reason why.

No, Apple is not purposely slowing down all old phones to convince people to buy the new ones. It’s actually happening because of the software upgrades they offer.
Before the iPhone 8 released on September 22nd, a software update for all mobile operating systems called iOS 11 was released on September 19th. Even the older iPhones were able to download and install this update, but that’s where it all goes wrong.
When an older phone installs newer software on top of the already existing software, problems can, and will occur. There are still parts of the phone, such as the applications, that are still using the ‘old software’, and other parts that have switched to the new. Things won’t always run so smoothly like that, and that’s where the problems start up.