The reason your phone may slow down when a new model is released

Have you ever noticed your phone's sluggish behaviour conveniently coincides with the release of a brand new model?

Well, you're not alone.

Over the last three months, since the release of the iPhone 8 and later the iPhone X, there has been a 50 per cent spike in search term "slow iphone" on Google.

Suggestions from conspiracy theorists claim tech giants purposely slow down devices in the immediate aftermath of a product release has begun to garner significant traction among smartphone users, The New York Times reported.

Yet according to experts, the perceived drop in a phone's performance is a little less far fetched than an alleged plot being labelled "planned obsolescence."

Greg Raiz, a former program manager for Microsoft who worked on Windows XP, has burst the bubble of the most outlandish cynic.

“There’s no incentive for operating system companies to create planned obsolescence," he said.

“It’s software, and software has various degrees of production bugs and unintended things that happen.”

When companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Google introduce new hardware, upgrades for their operating systems are often released as well.

When upgrading from an old operating system to a new one, technical tasks such as migrating your files, apps and setting is a complex and intricate procedure and takes its toll on older devices.

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After the lengthy update problems may occur that make certain aspects of your phone you took for granted such as opening applications feel sluggish.

In a bid to prevent the aging of a phone, Mr Riaz suggests backing up all your data and purging everything from the device before installing the new operating system.

He said backing up all your files to a computer and opting for a “clean install” is far more beneficial than allowing proceeding with a phone full of data.