People upgrade because what they have becomes worse as time goes on. Maybe you don't get OS updates any more and you can't run apps you want, maybe you do get OS updates and your phone is now slower. Maybe your battery charge lasts less than a day and you don't know you can replace your battery or don't want to. Some people I know almost always end up with cracked screens and upgrade rather than repair, and some other people play Ingress or Pokemon Go so heavily that their batteries don't even last a full day.
Chinese carriers offer minimal subsidies, so most customers are paying close to full retail for their phones and aren't tightly coupled to a two-year upgrade cycle. Used phones are a popular choice for value-oriented customers.
Repair is the norm rather than the exception, so most customers will replace a cracked screen or a weak battery rather than just disposing of their phone. Labor costs are relatively low and parts and documentation are widely available. Broken phones (especially iPhones) are frequently bought by dealers, repaired and resold.
The big Chinese brands offer relatively good long-term OS support, but that isn't hugely important for Chinese users. WeChat is the app in China (for many users, it's the only app they ever use) and it's extremely well optimised for older devices. The APK is a mere 60MB and it'll run smoothly on devices with a dual-core SoC and 1GB of RAM.
The US market has historically been the polar opposite of China, but it's creeping closer. Chinese manufacturers are making a push for the US market and consumers are starting to wise-up to the benefits of paying cash for a mid-range device rather than taking the "free" upgrade when their contract expires. The used market is flooded with two-year-old flagship handsets that will perform admirably for another few years with nothing more than a new battery.
IMO WeChat is bloated. While the app itself only uses n MB, it stores all chat history and embedded multimedia on the device itself. Eventually each group chat will hog >1GB. I uninstalled after they made the app refuse to run without constant GPS permission.
There isn't automatic conversation trimming? This is a feature Signal added years ago, I'm surprised iMessage doesn't have it. Then again, Apple seems to have the whole iMessage platform in maintenance mode, the biggest updates are emojis, no giphy integration or new features coming out biweekly or anything like that.
anecdotal feedback though.. your objection to them needing gps permission doesn't stack up at all against the robust platform wechat has become, which hundreds of millions depend on for everyday transactions.
So the OP's point of people in China mainly needing WeChat is 100% relevant. While your side comment about what a single user doesn't like about wechat is 100% irrelevant.
> consumers are starting to wise-up to the benefits of paying cash for a mid-range device rather than taking the "free" upgrade when their contract expires.
What "free phones" they are all leased now. There might not be a monthly fee but at the end of the lease their is a buy out to be paid. My wife's Essential phone (SHE HATES IT) is $6 a month for 24 months and then $430 if she want to keep this crash prone phone.
Was there an initial outlay? Depending on when one got it, < $150 for the best two years of what should have been a flagship level device sounds good to me, at least in theory...
Sprint have switched to leases with an optional balloon payment; Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T offer 0% finance plans with no final payment to own the device.
Regardless, all the networks offer their customers a new device with no money up front and the same monthly payment as soon as their contract expires. It's good for retention, but it means that a lot of customers are largely oblivious to the actual cost of their phone.
Also apps do get updated, and when they do they sometimes grow by almost a 100 MB. Repeat that X times, and the RAM on the phone turns out to be insufficient for larger apps of the new now.
Facebook app was 600MB on my girlfriend's phone. Unbelievable. What the hell does Facebook need 600MB for? (granted it was the mostly the data but it made her phone run like crap because the data is stored in internal storage, not on SD card). I cleared the data and it was back to 150MB in less that an hour. So off course people feel like their phones run like crap with apps like that.
I mean even a $50 phone today is extremely powerful for its price, but developers have no consideration for mobile constraints (then blame web techs...).
This anecdote is hard to believe (the slows the phone down part) because unless the app is constantly hammering the storage system with I/Os even as a background process, storage usage doesn't mean it's actively slowing the Phone down. Also it turns out that caching people's photos, etc., will save a lot of bandwidth and improve loading times (especially precious on mobile). Those JPEGs add up quickly...
Honestly I don't know how much consideration devs are actually paying attention to when most of them are probably using fairly recent high-end phones instead of the super cheap low-end mediatek android phones.
I've also noticed that low-end android phones tend cheap out on storage since most people only care about the size of storage not the speed.
Cache. Phones have limited storage, but they're also limited by bandwidth, latency and power. If the Facebook app did no caching it'd run slower, consume more battery and eat up the data allowance of people on limited plans.
Portable computing devices suffer a lot of abuse. It's very rare to drop your desktop PC in the toilet. Battery runtime is not inflating as quickly as CPU performance gains (which is now thermally limited). Non-user serviceable batteries is entirely on manufacturers.
Smart users get a case to make up for the inherent fragility of glass.
