[xenic]

The iPhone “I made this story up” is my guess.

Certainly major software updates can break things, but that is why you can (though not always quite easily) downgrade for a while after an update.

[nordsieck]

It's not impossible if it were an early iPhone - particularly one before iPhone 5.

Not really relevant to modern iPhones, but they wouldn't know that if they've sworn off iPhones since.

[kaba0]

Let’s not put those early phones into the same bracket with more modern ones — the phone market had a very steep improvement in its early years, that has only entered a more stagnating period a few years ago. Before that you pretty much had to buy a new phone each 3 years, now an iphone X is and will be available for many years to come.

[someotherperson]

I'm willing to bet it's an iPhone 4, because I had the same experience.

I switched to Android for several years after.

[andromeduck]

That's just scaling difficulty. Android was pretty shit back then too and continued to have performance degredattion due to other reasons like storge implementation unti a few years ago - idk about now.