Would a faster android phone, or one with more RAM help playing pogo?

More Ram = faster phone.

I'm still on an iphone 5c and simply can't dodge water pulse or psychic due to slow down... these are often used in meta and cripple certain gym battles. Disadvantages like that are certainly worthy of an upgrade if you're willing. I've also gotten to catch mons on my companions more recent phone and everything feels different... just more smooth. I think it's like playing any game, it could always run a bit better. Personally, if you can actually dodge every move I wouldn't care :). Otherwise It's really up to you and upgrades do make a slight difference.

I use (and used all long) an Asus zenfone 2 (android) with 4GB of ram.
My game is freaking SLOW.
So the answer is: NO.

Unfortunately overheating is a common problem with that phone. A better phone will definitely help.

Sure a better phone will perform better. For now. Every update seems to get incrementally worse though. The game is just poorly optimized and bloated. What we really need is a low resolution option to use simpler LOD models. Some people really love to have the best graphics possible, but I'd bet most of the player base wouldn't mind having lower quality graphics if it meant reducing battery drain/overheating and improving reliability of catching and battling.

What's happening is the game is overheating your phone which is causing the CPU to step down in speed. This throttling is a safeguard designed in CPUs to prevent permanent damage. Additional ram is NOT going to help you. I have an iPhone 6s and the same thing happens after a few gym battles. Until Niantic fixes the poor programming this is going to be a problem. There are already people complaining about permanent battery capacity loss due to overheating.

Same here, when my phone heat-up my playing game become slow specially in GYM battle. Sometimes I need to restart the phone in able to play again.

Problem is not the phone, a nexus 5x is good enough to run all the games smoothly for sure, I had a nexus 5 when the game first launch and did very well for the first months.

With each update Niantic is breaking more the game, I don't know how and why because I am not a developer but one thing is sure, the game performs worst each update, more battery drain, more overheat, more cpu and ram usage. This is breaking a lot of players hardware, destroying our batteries and our phones.

I have an almost brand new One Plus 3T, around 3 months old, the first month I was amazed from the difference between my old nexus and this, it lasted 5:30 of gameplay with almost zero overheat, a beast.
While the months are passing I am starting to notice a higher overheat and battery drain, nothing drastic, but now I can play around 4:30-4:45h max, I can only imagine what will happen if this continue like this in a year from now...My phone will be able to play the game only 1h or less. And this is not about doing a bad use of my battery, I don't let it overheat too much, stop playing everytime I see it is too hot, never charge it while playing and never let it go below 30%. Also I never play the hours I said before, I just play 1h or 1h30 per day, the time of the battery duration is a progression, I am losing around 25% per hour while 3 moths ago I barely lost 15-20% per hour.

I do everything I can to make my phone life better, but Niantic is killing our phones with the game.

So for now, I encourage to all people that is having those kind of issues to report the app as damaging hardware in google play (don't know if appstore has that option), it is a simple form with 4 or 5 questions and if a lot of us do it (a part from a report to Niantic), they will have to do something eventually about it (I hope...)

Here is the link, I reported the app a week or two ago as Harmful to my device, please everyone that has this problem do it.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/contact/takedown?hl=en