iOS 8 On iPhone 4S Affects Performance, You Probably Shouldn’t Update

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Apple clearly mentioned that iOS 8 will not support the iPhone 4, but they didn’t say anything about bad performance on the iPhone 4s. Yes, you heard it right. The iPhone 4s faces plenty of performance issues when running the newly released iOS 8 and it also lacks the HandOff feature and a few others. If you’re planning on updating your iPhone 4s to iOS 8, we suggest you should read this article before doing so.

According to a new test by ArsTechnica, the iPhone 4s lacks the hardware to run iOS 8 smoothly and the drawbacks are noticeable. The iPhone 4s has an Apple A5 chip, which simply cannot provide the power that iOS 8 requires. Upon installing iOS 8, you’ll notice apps taking longer to open, frame rate drops in games and choppy animations.

The iPhone 4s is also the smallest screen device in the Apple Stable and iOS 8 wants a larger screen to show more information in the Notification Center etc. As a result, you don’t get a lot of info on the iPhone 4s’ small 3.5-inch display. It also lacks hardware dependent features such as AirDrop, OpenGL ES 3.0, the new Metal graphics API and also new 64bit apps.

Here’s a chart showing the performance drop in some stock apps on an iPhone 4s running iOS 8:

It’s not as bad as iOS 7 on the iPhone 4, still it doesn’t look that good either. So, the question remains, are you willing to update to iOS 8 despite all these issues? If you don’t mind some lag, choppiness and less screen estate, then you should by all means get the latest iOS update.

We, however, would indeed ask iPhone 4s users to stay away from the iOS 8 update. Maybe the next update will improve performance, you never know.

What’s it gonna be? iOS 7 or iOS 8?