Iphone 3G slow after update to IOS4

My sentiments exactly! I'm so frustrated with the slow response of my 3G. It worked great before the iOS4 update.

I've got the same issues. It's not possible to normally use the iPhone 3G anymore. I'm going to wait another week, hoping Apple will release an update to speed up performance, otherwise I'll downgrade to 3.1.3. It's the first time in 15 years of using Apple products that I'm thinking of downgrading. Very disappointing...

*I updated my iPhone 3G, it was crap!*
*It was slow, low frequency antenna, and became more cumbersome to open applications.*

Hi John,

Strangely this helped me to fix the problem + removing the spotlight settings. Thanks.

I too have a much slower 3G after the update. I find that the maps app is now useless. Apple please respond to this request:

When introducing a new OS tell your users (they paid good money for your product and many are loyal to the brand): This update is for 3GS and the new iPhone4. It will work to some degree on earlier gen phones but will greatly slow performance.

Otherwise it resembles a nasty version of bait and switch. (move up to iPhone4) I would move to a completely new phone type if this was being done to me--not simply obediently upgrade to 4.

Since people report this problem "coming back" after awhile, I'd like to re-iterate, now after two full days of use with no reboots, that the AndrewsTech discovery of closing all Safari tabs, does seem to continue keeping the iOS4 on 3G performance well within the realm of reasonable.

Thanks again to the sleuthing of AndrewsTech.

I also tried doing this, and it improved a bit.
I have this FreeMemory app, which many of you may know. Well, with the previous system I would usualy get values between 28 and 30 MB of free memory. Now, with iOS 4 I would never go over 3, and most of the time the values would be around or under 2! After I dis what Andrews Tech suggested — closing Safari tabs, disable Spotlight searches and turn off a few more things (alerts, etc), I'm getting values between 6 and 7. Of course, I don't know how accurate or meaningful this values are, but the phone seems a bit more responsive.
Anyway, I never felt, as most of the people in this thread, that iOS4 had made the phone unusable. For me the effects have been 'acceptabel', so much so as I would hesitate about downgrading if I had the chance. Perhaps, it also has to do with the number of apps installed, number of screens, folders, etc. Just guessing.

Well, I'm glad it's working for you. Closing all Safari pages on the two iPhone 3Gs I have doesn't make a discernible difference in speed of other apps I have tried running. Safari still eventually crashes on both phones even when only viewing a single page at a time.

I don't have to reboot my phone every day either, but, the sluggishness and extreme slowness is still there in many apps. A reboot does help to temporarily speed things up for a few hours, so, I've gone back to rebooting the iPhone at least once a day to make the phone usable. But, this version of the OS is a LOT slower and unstable than the previous one was, that's for sure.

pedrocm wrote:
I have this FreeMemory app, which many of you may know. Well, with the previous system I would usualy get values between 28 and 30 MB of free memory. Now, with iOS 4 I would never go over 3, and most of the time the values would be around or under 2!

I have the popular AppBox Pro app on my 3G/16. It has a handy "Dashboard" function which displays the status of memory: how much is free, wired, active, and inactive. Right now, there is 11 MB free, but earlier today (when I had 3 Safari pages open), it was down to only 2 MB free (out of 57 MB total).

I'm going to keep an eye on memory usage and see if there is any correlation between sluggish performance and lack of free memory.

my iphone 3G is slow as old nick now i got os4 on, & cant downgrade to 3.1.3 wish i didnt bother, how about an announcement apple letting us know your working on the problem? your gonna loose customers....

I found this thread and followed his easy instructions. Believe it or not my 3G sped up. There are still some apps that bomb, ie. Fox News has to be started twice. My load times have increased. Try it.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11788075&#11788075

Any speed increase you may see by doing this is only because you restarted your phone and will be temporary. Your 3G will slow down again after using a few apps for awhile. I wish people would stop posting all these different steps as the solution. Turn this off, reset that, re-install this, rinse, repeat. It's a waste of time.

The problem is that the 3G hardware is not powerful enough to run iOS 4.0 as it stands. The only real solution will be an iOS update from Apple that fixes the problems.

TomNYC wrote:

The problem is that the 3G hardware is not powerful enough to run iOS 4.0 as it stands. The only real solution will be an iOS update from Apple that fixes the problems.

Exactly and more specifically, iOS4 uses 95% of the 3G iPhone's RAM doing nothing but being on (and running a small diagnostic program that measures the use of the RAM). The 3G has 128MB of RAM, 11MB of which is reserved for the graphics card. That leaves the phone with 117MB of available RAM. iOS4 uses about 111MB of the 3G's RAM leaving about 6 MB for use by 3G iPhone Apps.

The suggested "Hard Reset Voodoo" is definitely +temporary at best+ and +completely unacceptable+.

I'm by no means an iPhone hardware firmware guru, but using a 'free memory' app on my iPhone, after doing a reset/restore, which did help, I'm sitting at 47 MB free, 3G running iOS4. It will be interesting to monitor it over the next few days

Also seeing the slow lag when launching apps; even core apps like Phone and SMS...very frustrating. I am not going to upgrade to an iPhone 4 if Apple doesn't demonstrate basic backward compatibility principles.

I also don't believe the OS 4 features offered to 3G are that stellar to begin with, as if there was a strategy to drive 3GS (mostly coming off of contract) to the new hardware. Seriously, why can't a 3G device show a picture behind the home screen????

I really want to like this product ... Love my iPad!