You have had your phone for more than two years now. They are releasing a new model this year, but you do not quite need to upgrade yet as your phone works perfectly fine. However, few weeks after the new model release, your phone crashes. Clueless, you simply reboot it and it works perfectly fine again. Give it one more month, and it will crash again, this time to reboot slightly slower. Your battery life begins to die quickly –way more quickly than before. I guess, the battery is just dying off, that must be it, right? It is been five months after the release, and the phone is barely usable. It is way too slow, and anything I do drains half the battery. You know what; just use it for calls and nothing else. This phone is death.

Phones die off. I get it. I understand that, and you probably do so too. However, due to the fact that almost everything inside of your phone is data, it can be very easily manipulated by administrative users, or rather, your phone’s brand. It could be extremely easy for them to change the data inside your phone, making it nearly useless. Your battery, for example, is controlled by data inside your phone. No, I do not mean that the more data you use, the faster it drains. The amount of time your phone takes to go from one hundred perfect to completely dead is recorded, as well as the data usage during that span of time. It’s compared to previous times, and whatever unknown algorithms hidden under the phone’s code run in order to calculate how long the next one hundred percent will last. Several more factors are most likely taken into the equation, but in the end, it is just an estimate from a computation –a vulnerable and editable computation. On a side note, and due to this, it is recommended to allow your phone to run out of battery every now and then. Now, how hard would it be for your phone brand to tweak this code? They do not even need the phone physically, since the phone’s connected to their bandwidth anyway. Making your battery last lesser is not really a hard task, neither is decreasing performance, or doing any other sort of changes with the goal of frustrating the user and, finally, motivates the purchase of their new model.

And your carrier could do it too. There were times where unlimited data was ultra-rare. Having it would be a privilege worthy of gods. However, it started backfiring for carrier companies, making them lose money. Eventually, they removed these unlimited data plans, and began offering limited ones for new users, but all previous users still had the unlimited data plan. What would they do now? Slow the crap out of the user’s wireless speed, of course. Without their consent, and not really a way they could debate about it since they would change their policies and agreements (which, honestly, no one reads) unlimited data users would get the worst coverage and speed their carrier could humanly give. The user would call the carrier company, asking what is up with your download speed, and ultimately suggest you upgrade to their newer plans with speed almost twenty times faster, but limited data.

All these tiny things can be unseen. You could really believe your phone is dying and not being slowly killed by your phone maker and you could deal with the slow internet speed you are now stuck with. One would never think there would be tiny and shady things happening in the background, and maybe they are not really happening at all. It could really be your phone dying. It could be something else. It could be that new house you moved in that lacks proper coverage. In the end, you would end up upgrading anyway, would you not?