About a month ago, for less than €40, I bought an iPhone 4S at a local second-hand shop. I wanted a 16 GB white model, but they only had an 8 GB unit in white. So I went with the black option. I already have a black iPhone 4: a white 4S would have really been a nice addition to my collection, but never mind, I’ll get there eventually. I was mostly interested in how it performed anyway, so for now æsthetics come second. 

The three main reasons why I decided to acquire an iPhone 4S now, specifically, are:

1. I’m still taking notes on the evolution of iOS’s user interface in its most transformative period; I currently own several vintage iOS devices, each running a different version of iOS, from iPhone OS 3 on a first-generation iPod touch, to iOS 10 on an iPhone 5. All except iOS 8, so I needed a device where I could see it in action. The iPhone 4S can be updated up to iOS 9.3.5, and that’s the version you’ll very likely find installed when you acquire an iPhone 4S today. But the downgrade to iOS 8.4.1 is actually very straightforward, more than I expected.
2. I wanted to see if and how an iPhone 4S — a device from almost eight years ago — could hold up in 2019 with regard to performance and features.
3. I love the iPhone 4/4S design and form factor. I still use my iPhone 4 every now and then (mostly to keep using apps that are now discontinued, but also because it’s so great to handle), but its Home button has progressively become less responsive, making the phone less enjoyable to operate. An iPhone 4S was an ideal candidate to turn to.

After bringing my ‘new’ iPhone 4S home and charging it fully, I played a bit with the fresh installation of iOS 9.3.5 it came with, and the first impression was that it behaved a bit better than many reports had led me to believe. Sure, there was some lag here and there, but nothing especially intolerable. Perhaps this was because the phone had just been restored and was only populated with Apple apps, while performance starts degrading once the phone is loaded with a slew of third-party apps and needs to juggle more tasks.

Anyway, I needed to downgrade it to iOS 8.4.1 for my ‘research’, and I was already worried it would be a convoluted hacking process. Far from it. You probably can find other resources and tutorials on the Web. For me, these two videos by 91Tech were enough:

• How to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 (Any 32-bit device)
• How to downgrade to iOS 8 (iPhone 5, 4S, iPad 4 & More!)

In broad terms, the process goes like this: you first jailbreak the iPhone so that you can install a piece of software that fools the iPhone into believing it’s still on iOS 6, so that in turn it can trigger the (genuine) over-the-air update to iOS 8.4.1. The beauty of this — for those who don’t like to have a jailbroken device — is that once you download and install iOS 8.4.1, the update process removes any previous jailbreaking, and you find yourself with a fresh, clean, legit installation of iOS 8.4.1.

And iOS 8 on this iPhone is indeed a better option. Everything is smooth and the device feels pleasantly responsive. Also, I was almost forgetting how nice it is to hold a smaller iPhone that can easily be operated with just one hand. 

I appreciated this especially when taking photos. While I really haven’t had issues when taking portrait shots with the iPhone 5 before and the iPhone 8 now, the iPhone 4S is simply perfectly balanced for this task. You hold it in your hand as you frame your shot, and the phone feels stable without you having to adjust your hand — or using two hands — to counterbalance any possible wiggling or shaking. Even in landscape orientation I managed to keep the phone stabilised with just one hand. 

Isn’t a 3.5‑inch display a bit small for today’s standards? — More than ‘standards’, I’d say ‘habits’, but anyway. There are two major scenarios where a smaller display such as this may show its limits today, I think. The first is media consumption, particularly videos. While you can definitely watch a YouTube video on the iPhone 4S^[1] — the device is still powerful enough to provide playback without hiccups — you’ll just want a bigger, more widescreen viewing area. The second is web browsing. Here, the problem isn’t so much that a lot of today’s websites are tailored for bigger screens, even on mobile (although this has an undeniable impact), but web advertising. There are essentially no content blockers for iOS 8 (and 32-bit devices in general)^[2], and a lot of websites end up crowding that 3.5‑inch screen with ads and popups that are difficult to dismiss given the cramped space. Still, I’ve been positively surprised by the iPhone 4S’s ability to handle certain heavy, ad-ridden websites.

The Verge’s cookie policy popup warning is so big you can’t even view it in its entirety on the iPhone 4S display. But once you get past it, the site is capably handled by the device.

How’s the app situation under iOS 8? — I still haven’t had the time to thoroughly check whether all my favourite apps and services work on the iPhone 4S or not, but I’ve installed a basic setup of third party apps, and all of the following still work (I mean their ‘last compatible version’, of course):

• Web Browsers: Safari, Brave, Firefox.
• Music streaming: Spotify.
• Cloud services: Dropbox and Box.
• Photo/image editing apps: Camera+, Snapseed, BLACK, Skitch, Annotate.
• To access Flickr, I use a nice client called Pure that still works under older iOS versions (even iOS 6).
• RSS feeds and read-it-later services: Reeder and Instapaper.
• Wikipedia browsing: both Wikipanion and Wikiwand are nice apps that work well on smaller screens.
• Podcasts: Apple’s Podcasts works, of course, and Pocket Casts still works on my iPhone 4 with iOS 7, so I’ve reason to believe it should work under iOS 8 as well. 
• The YouTube app.
• Twitter’s official client works, and you’ll enjoy an overall less cluttered experience, but you’ll face the old 140-character limit when writing a tweet. (Alas, same goes for third-party clients such as Twitterrific and Tweetbot).
• My favourite dictionary for quick lookups, WordWeb.
• I haven’t yet installed third-party messaging apps. When I purchased the iPhone, I was told that WhatsApp wouldn’t work on this device, but since I don’t use WhatsApp it’s not a problem (when I told this to the young clerk, she looked at me as if I had just landed on Earth and exited my spaceship). But Telegram should work. (iMessage works, of course).
• For some “Apple works in mysterious ways” reasons, AirDrop was not enabled on the iPhone 4S when the feature debuted in iOS 7, but Scotty, my favourite third-party utility to send photos wirelessly from iOS devices to Macs still work great under iOS 8.

Overall, using an iPhone 4S with iOS 8 still provides a decent experience today. The hardware is snappy, the user interaction is fluid, and one-handed operation is just awesome — whereas under iOS 9 the kind of response you seem to get from the phone is I’m okay, but I guess I had too much to eat last night. And while you’ll certainly find more updated apps with iOS 9, the app situation under iOS 8 is not that bad. Perhaps because iOS 8 introduced a lot of new features at the time, in my research I’ve found a fair amount of apps that, when “downloading the last compatible version”, appear to have iOS 8 as minimum requirement. I’ve noticed that because when trying to install them on my iPhone 4 with iOS 7, I got the alert This application requires iOS 8.0 or later. You must update to iOS 8.0 in order to download and use this application.

Speaking of the new features introduced in iOS 8, I must say I was surprised to find many I thought had been introduced later:

• The Health app and HealthKit.
• QuickType, the predictive typing feature that displays word selections above the keyboard as you type.
• The ability to install third-party keyboards.
• Handoff.
• iCloud Drive.
• Siri’s hands-free activation (“Hey, Siri”).

The combination of such features and the decent availability of still-functioning apps make iOS 8 feel ‘younger’ than it is, and the device running iOS 8 less ‘out of the loop’ than a device that can’t be updated past iOS 7. (Though one very visible detail betraying iOS 8’s vintage is the use of Neue Helvetica as system font. The Apple-designed San Francisco font would debut in iOS 9.)

Would I recommend the iPhone 4S as a primary device today? Heh. It’s a tricky question to answer. I think the only kind of person to find an iPhone 4S appealing is someone who simultaneously: a) has essentially no budget to spend on a smartphone; b) isn’t a tech nerd but just someone who would use a smartphone for basic tasks; c) strongly dislikes big phones and for whom even a 4‑inch device like the iPhone 5/5s/5c is too big to handle.

Then there would be the software side of the recommendation: leaving iOS 9.3.5 or downgrading to iOS 8.4.1? It’s ultimately a matter of compatibility versus speed. iOS 9 would offer a wider selection of still-modern-enough iOS apps. iOS 8 would offer a more optimised, refined, faster performance and better responsiveness. 

• Brief aside: the vintage iPhone I’d actually recommend to those with very limited budget (meaning they cannot afford even a second-hand 16 GB iPhone SE) would be an iPhone 5 with iOS 10, or a 5s with iOS 12. I’m in complete agreement with the aforementioned 91Tech YouTuber in thinking that the iPhone 5 is the best all-round iPhone Apple has ever made. It ran flawlessly all the iOS versions it supported with no decrease in performance as it went from iOS 6 to 7, to 8, to 9 to 10. It’s still a capable phone today even if it can’t go past iOS 10.3.3 (as I’m writing this, my iPhone 5 is downloading 28 app updates, so there’s still third-party activity for this two-year-old version of iOS), but an iPhone 5s may be more appealing to those who have just a little bit more money to spend, and want a 64-bit device with a current operating system and a secure authentication method such as Touch ID.

As I’m concluding this series of quick observations, it just occurred to me that the iPhone 4S could also make for an interesting backup phone or ‘detox’ phone for those who are reaching ‘smartphone fatigue’ and look for something more basic to use on weekends or during excursions or gatherings. Something that still enables them to make and receive calls and messages, check for that important email, etc., but not something that makes them want to stare at it all the damn time.