Modern GPS receivers are much faster. They can search for every possible satellite at every offset rapidly in parallel, meaning that they don't need the almanac in order to get a GPS lock quickly. They do still need the orbital data for each satellite being used, but that's transmitted by the satellite itself much more regularly than the almanac and mobile phones can generally speed things up even further by downloading a small amount of assistance data that contains orbits for all the satellites for the next day or so.