Android on iPhone 3G? Slow iOS 4.2.1?

Forums › Apple iOS and devices › Android on iPhone 3G? Slow iOS 4.2.1?

gzt

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#91049 5-Oct-2011 20:04

I have a 3G (not S). The 4.2.1 update slowed it to the point where a great deal of patience is required to start applications and click links. But the main problem is that any kind of scrolling in Safari is a minefield. 4.2.1 is most likely the last update for 3G.

So I started to consider Android. Anyone running Android on an iPhone?

The most up to date project I could find is iDroid http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/FAQ. iDroid has no power saving features implemented yet, therefore (they say) expect a batt life around 2 hours.

Any other distributions worth considering?

This is all plan (c).

My plan (b) is to go back to an earlier 4.x update and see if that brings performance back to acceptable levels, or go further back to 3.x if I really really have to.

johnr

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#529767 5-Oct-2011 20:06

Why not get a newer iPhone

gzt

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#529776 5-Oct-2011 20:25

It is on the cards but I will keep this one going for now and pass it on in working condition. Next phone will be Android.

BerG

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#529784 5-Oct-2011 20:50

Haha.

My 3GS was struggling on iOS4.

I commend you for putting up with a 3G for this long.

Dunnersfella

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#529791 5-Oct-2011 21:08

3G on 4.2.1 is painful, painful... painful.
I have gone down the path of jailbreaking etc, but I'm yet to try a different OS all together. Either way, the phone is now close to unusable. If you do wind your phone back to an older OS, let us (me) know what works for you... I'd be very interested.

gzt

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#529799 5-Oct-2011 21:19

BerG: Haha. My 3GS was struggling on iOS4. I commend you for putting up with a 3G for this long.

I may have gone from iOS3.x straight to iOS4.2.1. I updated to iOS4 about 6 months ago. I did not use the browser a lot in the intervening period. I did notice the long start time for the iPod app, but it wasn't until recently when I started to use the browser a lot (esp any scrolling) and switching between functions that it really became a problem for me.

Will keep the thread updated.

djbutt

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#529809 5-Oct-2011 21:56

I rolled back to 4.1 for tethering purposes but it's still super sluggish (hint: keep the number of windows you have open in Safari to a minimum, even when you are not using the app - for some reason this seems to slow it down).

I only have a couple of non stock apps (e.g. Tripit) but many of them require the latest update. I'd like to go back to 3.x myself.

johnr's comment is the complete problem - a perfectly adequate phone is made worse not because you want to do new things with it, but because other phones want to do new things, and the 'ecosystem' makes it rational to include underpowered phones with the hope that you'll buy a new one. And the free market was supposed to bring the efficient use of resources?

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Yatey

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#529829 5-Oct-2011 22:31

Long time since I have posted on Geekzone...

I currently have a iPhone 3G, and I am quite happy with it at the moment until I have the money to upgrade to a 4 (I was disappointed with the 4S update this morning).

I have researched a lot on how to speed up my iPhone 3G, and it basically comes down to having to downgrade to iOS 3. If you are confident with jailbreaking and tweaking some features, I have created a guide on another forum which has successfully helped many people speed up their iPhone 3G's on iOS 4.2.1. If anyone is interested in using this guide, I am quite happy to post it here. I do run ios 4.2.1 on my iPhone 3G, and I do not have many issues with it.

You could also try whited00r (modified iOS 3 firmware files that have features and performance in mind).

Jordan, Auckland University.
“Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” - Paul Rand

gzt

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#529841 5-Oct-2011 22:53

The tweak guide would be great. How about putting that in a separate topic?

Whited00r sounds very interesting. Thanks for the tip on that, I'll look into it.

Dunnersfella

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#529842 5-Oct-2011 22:54

I'm really quite interested in your rollback, if you could post the link it would be great.
Cheers,
D-Fella.

djbutt

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#529844 5-Oct-2011 23:05

Thanks Yatey, I'd also be interested in the rollback!

Yatey

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#529916 6-Oct-2011 09:16

This isn't quite a rollback, as I use iOS 4.2.1 in my guide.

Direct from: http://www.sinfuliphone.com/showthread.php?t=82271

I have been looking through the Sinful iPhone forum community alot since I joined a couple of weeks ago, and I am surprised to see the amount of people claiming that (in their experience), 3.1.3 is the best iOS version for their iPhone 3G's.
I inherited my uncle's old iPhone 3g (which was running 4.1 at the time) nearly two months ago. I decided to update to ios 4.2.1 because I knew of the improvements that 4.2.1 gave compared to 4.1 (at least thats what the offical change log told me).

I have been running ios 4.2.1 ever since, and I have been pretty happy with its performance. Ever since I received my 3G, I have read about how it performs badly on ios4, so I decided to troll the internet to find out ways that I could make my 3G fast without having to downgrade to ios 3.1.3, loosing the compatibility to run almost any App from the App store.

I decided to make my 3G able to run multitasking and homescreen wallpapers. As people who are in the know with the iPhone 3g and ios 4.2.1, Apple changed the openGLS compatibility with the device, which made the use of multitasking difficult since if you were in an app, and then used multitasking o move to another app, you would respring your device, and then have to exit Safe mode). I will talk about the solution for this during this post.

So to start off with, I performed a CLEAN install of ios 4.2.1 (not restoring from back up).
Straight after the restore (without syncing anything to my 3G) I Jail-broke with redsn0w 0.9.6b5. If you want multitasking and homescreen wallpapers, it is important to select both these options with the redsn0w application (I will talk about this later).
When your iPhone has rebooted and shows the Cydia icon on your homescreen, go into Cydia, set up the filesystem, and then after the reboot go into cydia to start the magic

First off, we want to stop unnecessary Daemons from slowing our device. To do this, I have simply used a Cydia Tweak called Daemon Tools. It is found on the repo repo.insanelyi.com. I have never found a problem with my iPhone after I have let this package take away some unnecessary Daemons, so hopefully you wont have a problem either.

Once Daemon tools is installed, I then installed Springtomize from the sinfuliphone repo. This app is great at removing features that will speed up your iphone a lot.

Once Springtomize is installed, go into it (Settings > Springtomize) and apply these tweaks

General - Disable Spotlight ON
Icons - Hide Shadow ON
Icons - Disable Jittering ON (Optional, but makes moving apps easier)
Dock - Hide Icons Reflection ON
Lockscreen - Slider - Custom Sting ON (leave the custom string empty) - In my experience this makes the lockscreen less laggy upon waking up from sleep
Folders - Remove Animation ON
App Switcher - Start Editing ON (Allows the multitasking Apps to automatically appear with an 'X' icon to remove from the multitasking tray)
Animations - Custom Duration ON (Have the slider bar almost all the way to the left) This option determines the speed of the animations that iOS makes, for example when moving through settings options.

Even though you are able to 'enable' homescreen wallpapers and multitasking in Springtomize, I ran into some difficulty enabling homescreen wallpapers via springtomize. After i enabled it in the springtomize settings area, I would not be able to choose what my homescreen wallpaper was (It stayed on the default waterdrop one). So if you want homescreen wallpapers and multitasking, it is important to select these features when jailbreaking via redsn0w.

After you have done this, respring.
Make sure that to make your device even faster, you remove all of the Spotlight indexing options in Settings (Settings > Spotlight Search), and to turn MMS off.

IMPORTANT FOR MULTITASKING: If you want multitasking to properly work, you will need to edit the plist file via SSH or iFile. Help on how to do this is available here (FIX: How to make Multitasking work in ios4.2.1 without crashing - SiNfuL iPhone)

After I had done this, I then went on to install SBSettings (because I like the 'free processes' feature it has), and also bitesms (because of the ability to reply to text messages while having another application open behind it.)

After I applied all of the above tweaks, I am left with about 60mb of free memory after I remove all my multitasking apps and I use the free memory option in SBsettings (Just under half of the total amount of ram the iPhone 3G has!).

Some important tips that I have found out while using my 3G has been to limit the amount of apps/tweaks that you download from both the app store and cydia, limit the amount of music, video etc you have on the device, and also perform monthly hard resets (holding the lock and home button down until the screen goes black, then rebooting with the lock button). Doing a hard reset twice or three times at the same time helps compared to just one reset.

My battery life is still decent with this set up. After a full charge, I will get around 2 days of use (normally this will consist of calling for 2.5 hours, 30min data use, 3 hour wifi, 1 hour music each day).

If you try this set up, please reply to this topic and let me know your experience. I highly recommend this set up, as the benefits of being able to run ios4 apps is huge, and the ability to run multitasking and have a homescreen wallpaper is great as well.

Jordan, Auckland University.
“Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” - Paul Rand

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gzt

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#530019 6-Oct-2011 12:18

djbutt: I rolled back to 4.1 for tethering purposes but it's still super sluggish (hint: keep the number of windows you have open in Safari to a minimum, even when you are not using the app - for some reason this seems to slow it down).

On 4.2.1 I've been doing the same. [closing all Safari windows before I exit]

This jogged my memory. iBooks used to be ok until I started using Safari a lot. After that iBooks became nearly unusable for some titles.

I cleared the Safari cache just now and iBooks is now performing adequately again.

Also, the o/s and other applications also seem to be responding better [not as well as 3x but at least it is usable again]

Settings -> Safari -> Clear Cache

Does it work for anyone else as well?

gzt

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#530039 6-Oct-2011 12:44

djbutt: a perfectly adequate phone is made worse not because you want to do new things with it, but because other phones want to do new things, and the 'ecosystem' makes it rational to include underpowered phones with the hope that you'll buy a new one.

Particular apps and features aside, for me the main issue is security updates. Security updates (and all other updates) for 3G ended at 4.2.1. Note: The 3GS is still supported right through including 5.

That is still two and a half years of security maintenance since my purchase at release - which is pretty good for a phone. If I had purchased it later it would not be so good tho.

That said, providing an update which significantly cuts the performance of the device in half in some areas is not a nice move for consumers. I doubt that was strictly necessary, just convenient and cheaper than maintaining two iOS versions at the same time.

[Edit: Corrected support life to 2.5 years]

jonherries

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#530084 6-Oct-2011 13:43

Hey couple more thoughts from me.

I have a 3gs, and find it seems slower over time as well. I am reluctant to JB for no other reason than I don't have time to learn about the options you describe.

But I have a couple of permanent changes to speed up 4.3.3. I have uninstalled almost every app I have and I have disabled the spotlight search. I have also turned off all accessibility options including voice-over.

I have a routine that I run regularly for maintenance purposed which is using the "Free Memory" app. I think it kills processes using a memory leak, which frees ram. I then also do a hard restart on my phone every week. Not switching off, but holding those same buttons for a wee bit longer so the screen de-powers and the apple logo comes up.

Just tried clearing the safari cache, cookies and history, hopefully that also helps.

Jon