The stick plugged into the telly in my spare room is old. Genuinely old — I bought it not long after they first came out, it has been in three houses, and by any sensible measure it should have been binned years ago. It has about a gigabyte of memory and the processor of a decent calculator.
I keep it going out of stubbornness, and for a while that stubbornness was not paying off. Every app I put on it either refused to install or installed and then sat there doing nothing while the little wheel spun.
The mistake I was making was assuming the problem was the internet. It was not. The connection in that room is the same as everywhere else in the house. The problem was that modern apps are built assuming modern hardware, and this thing has none.
The fix was a stripped-back player. Not a compromise version of a good app — a properly lightweight one, built to run on very little.
The difference was not subtle. The heavy app took over forty seconds to get to a usable screen and would fall over if I asked it to do two things at once. The light one was up in about five, and it has not crashed since I installed it.
What is going on underneath is mostly memory. When the app wants more than the device has, the system starts shuffling things in and out and everything grinds. A smaller app never gets near that ceiling.
I sorted mine out using this walkthrough of the lite player, which is written for people setting it up on a decent device but works even better as a rescue plan for an old one.
If you want to know why memory is the thing that decides this, the RAM basics cover it.
The stick is going nowhere. Ask me again in five years.