this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I don't think it's the responsibility of unpaid app developers to work around that, especially when you can probably install a somewhat recent custom ROM. I have an ancient Nexus 4 with LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11, the last version for 32bit CPUs) and that version of LineageOS is still getting updates every few months.
LineageOS doesn't pass google's SafetyNet, so it locks you out of a lot of banking apps, and also some other important apps.
It's possible to run those by rooting the phone and doing some hackery to trick the app into bypassing the SafetyNet check, but that's a race against google security features.
Besides, I gave up running LOS on my old phone and just bought a new phone with stock android 13, and Jerboa crashes on startup on it as well.
There are Magisk modules that help with those problems. Yes, it's additional word but using ancient, unsupported, and insecure Android versions is definitively not the proper solution.
That's impressive
Yes but it's also not that uncommon for Google phones to get many years of updates thanks to community ROMs. Google actually supports old Android versions for a pretty long time, it's just that suites at Google don't want them to formally ship on their own phones and that's how LineageOS and even smaller community ROMs get support those phones with "relatively little" effort (at least compared to phones by random Android OEMs).
That's good to hear. I would be curious to get a Pixel 4a, put LineageOS on it and see how long it would last
I have a 4a right now, plan to replace the battery sometime and switch to a community ROM when Google's formal support ends
FYI: You can't just install LinreageOS on top. It'll require a full wipe. Should you do cloud backups anyway, the step is not that bad. If you never dabbled with that, it's a bit intimidating at first but actually it's not that hard once you grasped the basics.
Asking users to install custom roms to browse Lemmy doesn't seem sound a good strategy for Lemmy to beat Reddit. What I'm wondering is whether Android 8 development is somehow easier than Android 7 development. I have not looked at the source code of RedReader. Someone mentioned the existence of Reddit API emulation for Lemmy. Maybe the easiest thing is run that, and point a copy of RedReader at it.
Lineage does sound nice, but it doesn't support my phone.
I don't ask anything of you. You're the one asking volunteer app developers to support your insecure ancient Android version. Installing a new version of Android is a good idea in any case but if you want to continue "resisting" just deal with apps becoming incompatible with time.
My phone came with Android 6, the vendor shipped an upgrade to Android 7, and I installed that. They didn't release any more upgrades. The phone hardware itself is still perfectly good so I really don't want to take part in a hardware upgrade treadmill just because the vendors like to play Wintel. I'm typing this on a laptop from 2011 (Thinkpad X220) that also still works (hasn't fallen apart yet), running Debian 11. It won't run the latest Windows but I don't care.
I still haven't heard any type of explanation what of what stops Jerboa from working with older Androids. If it would take a total rewrite then I can understand the devs not wanting to do that. If it means changing a #define then I'd say change the #define. As a general matter I find Lemmy's web design to be bloatier and more annoying than old.reddit so I'm not sure I would like Jerboa anyway (I haven't seen it). New Reddit is of course too horrible to think about.
I appreciate the work that the devs and ops have put into Lemmy but I frankly preferred the keyboard based UI's of 40 year old Usenet readers to these Javascript pages that squirm all over the screen. So I want to keep persuing text based viewers like RedReader and Gnus. I'd try Jerboa if it was convenient for me to do so, but I'm not going to buy a new phone to run a program that I have doubts about to begin with.