I was gonna say, this sounds familiar.

Really though, some times it’s by design. I remember back when you could jailbreak your iPhone (effectively). Those were the days…so much cool shit you could do on an iPhone back then.

One of the things you could do though was change your animation speed. You know, just how fast it would do those little swoops and sweeps and things like that when opening apps or transitioning or whatever. It was a little thing, but I appreciated being able to change it, a lot. I used to set it at 0 so everything was as snappy as possible. No animations, just pop pop pop. Like in Windows 7 when you turn off all animations and effects. I would experiment though sometimes with new iOS versions on other devices as well as my own when they came out. Don’t want to be left behind and be susceptible to security risks, right?

It didn’t take me long to catch on that they would, little by little, extend the animations times slightly as they got closer to a new major version number release. I noticed that when you would upgrade, they would adjust the animation speed again with the major release, but instead of slowing it down, put it back to normal. They basically made it so that when you finally upgraded to the new (slightly buggy) major version, you felt it ran better and were happy you did so. It was all a trick, and you were being manipulated. It didn’t run better, it just seemed that way because they slowed down the previous version’s animations. Now, I know how Apple thinks and works. It’s both to make sure you’re on the latest version they can get you on as well as try to keep you thinking they are always improving things and be happy you upgraded. But, it’s just a bit disappointing to realize that they’re manipulating you in little ways like that to keep you on-board.

Not the first time Google or phone manufacturers have taken some cues from Apple’s practices in this area. It seems like time and time again we see some people like Android users and Linux enthusiasts complaining about Apple’s practices only to be dismayed that Google or their favorite phone manufacturer starts practicing the very same thing. The fact of the matter is, Apple did ALL the research. They don’t care about all us nerds who see what’s going on. We’re the minority. The majority are happily manipulated in this way, unknowingly. Why wouldn’t they follow suit? Apple is WILDLY successful.