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Custom ROMs have had just about enough of being Android's second-class citizens
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Even without the custom ROMs, the whole Android ecosystem is a colossal fucking mess.
I've got old apps that won't work any more. It's not even compatible with itself.
People give Windows a load of shit, and deservedly so for some of it, but it's a million times more usable than Android when you want shit to "just work".
Same with iOS, I don't know why you are singling out Android here. My favorite game back when I used an iPad stopped working after certain update. It was a puzzle with rails and colored trains, can't remember the name now.
Windows and Linux are quite a lot better in this regard.
I'm not singling them out, it just happens to be a thread about Android.
There's no reason for mobile OS's to be flaky like this. There's nothing magic about either that means old stuff can't be supported. It's just that trillion dollar corporations apparently can't afford the resources.
There kind of is, software changes and things need to be updated by comparison, your windows example is a double edged sword, there's a lot of bloat and Microsoft can't make changes that might be beneficial on windows because of all the backwards compatability layers and services they generally leave in. It's good and bad in it's own way.
I suppose you're talking about a 32-bit app that wasn't updated for the newer 64-bit architecture. If yes, then there's actually a technical reason behind it, not just Apple being dicks. Because other than 32-bit apps, every app that received a 64-bit update should still work on the latest iOS.
I'm actually for this. The bar to entry for the Play Store is too low with too many low quality and unmaintained apps. I'm all for booting insecure and super old apps. They cheapen the ecosystem.
Well that's all very well, but I've got a bathroom speaker I can no longer access.
So how about instead of Daddy Google deciding what's best for everyone, they let things run and give you a warning?
Hell, I've even got games I've paid for that are now gone. Honestly, fuck them for even thinking that's acceptable.
Same, it's why I never buy a game or app nowadays, they will just stop working when the new OS version comes around, devs already got their money so they don't have any incentive to care, and contrary to PC I can't do shit about it myself on my phone, there's no "androidbox" to run old apps inside my phone.
That is not what's happening. It takes tons of work to maintain backward compatibility but you're framing it as though it doesn't and they're just being a holes on purpose.
Why can't you connect to the speaker with Bluetooth?
It doesn't allow direct connection. You have to dick about with a stupid app to put it in "speaker mode" first.
Damn that sucks!!!! I wish there was a way to sandbox older apps. I've ran into the same issue with old apps before.
Gives me Sonos vibes.
I won a Sonos speaker years ago, thing needed (from memory) an app to switch to AUX mode. The speaker sounded great but I didn't want to install an app just to use the thing.
In a grand spectacle my ex's cat kicked a potplant off a windowsill into our fish tank. That shorted a power board, we didn't have breakers (ceramic / wire fuses) which ended up killing the speaker.
Honestly as nice of a speaker it was, good riddance.
The problem is allowing the APIs it uses to exist at all in the OS is a huge security hole.
So it's my choice to run them?
If I can download an APK, I should be able to run it in a "compatibility mode" and have the OS do it's best to run it.
There's a few apps that let you virtualize an older version of Android, but in my experience they're slow, and they're all from sketchy-looking Chinese companies that are for sure harvesting all your data. There's also an open source project running for this, but I don't remember what it was called and it was fairly limited.
It can't.
A compatibility mode would involve meaningful cost, massively compromise security, and not have a chance in hell of working.
They could just spin up a container of some sort. It's still fundamentally Linux, so it should be possible to run Android inside an lxc container the same way you can run a desktop Linux distro in docker (which is based on the lxc functionality in the Linux kernel)
The point is that you have to emulate a fuckton of low level access to even have a chance of anything working. Either you replace the actual hardware access with junk data, making none of the apps work, or you break the whole permissions structure, and your security is completely gone.
All of those APIs were deprecated because it's impossible to provide them in any way that resembles security.
I mean, as long as it's in a pretty robust sandbox and it's either firewalled or has no network access (if possible for the app in question), I would think security implications are minimal. Like, even if the version of Android inside the container is compromised, the app could only take over its own container, which is non-privileged and doesn't have access to anything you didn't explicitly give it (in terms of user data).
But almost every app is going to crash because they're built on needing the information those APIs return.
His example of not being able to control some wireless speaker? Supporting that app is going to be a mess, best case.
You'd need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.
Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn't be able to run software for anything before like,, Android 12 or 13 probably.
How we all wish there was a third option, I would genuinely take less functionality in favour of privacy and performance. I don't need AI and fancy image processing. I want to use my phone to pay the old way, like when samsung copied the magnetic strip info, not like now where google gets a copy of my receipts.
Sucks iOS is the alternative, nearly gave in last week but the price was just too much for what I was getting.
That's true for every operating system. Old apps aren't updated to use new system APIs and such and they eventually stop working.
Yet I can compile applications that work on Windows XP, and they still work under Windows 11.
It's not as if Android is some svelte slimline OS where every byte matters. There's plenty of room there for keeping compatibility with older apps.
Dude there's millions of lines of code and thousands of hours per year that keep old windows shit running. It's a nightmare to support that. Microsoft has made that a priority and you can easily argue it shouldn't be, but you seem convinced that's the only valid path. It's not.
On desktops we can use virtual environments, translation layers, plenty of solutions to make old programs and games work on a modern OS. Phones are somehow incapable of this.
Software that is 10 years old and unmaintained is likely unsafe to use and therefore shouldn't work. Windows has a lot of issues specifically because it's backward compatible with ancient software, actually. Security and a path forward should matter more than clinging to old software that must stop working someday regardless of how hard you try to delay it. Emulation/VMs are and should be a way to work around that on desktop and it would actually be nice if mobile OSes had that too. That way at least the ancient software can be sandboxed and not a security weakpoint. The right approach though is not to do this horrible patchwork of APIs like windows which creates a security nightmare
Where do you run your old Windows Phone apps nowadays? What about new Windows Phone apps?
On my Windows Phone silly
Can't tell if that's a horrible wallpaper or a totally fucked up screen
It's a photo from a disused quarry that my granddad used to work in
I see it! That's pretty cool.
Dude, that's sick, thank you! I wish I had a better pic to offer but this is the best I can do since Jerboa app is not currently letting me upload pictures in a comment...
🤘🏼
Rad
Ah, memories.
Memories? Pssshhhh, he took that pic an hour ago...
How?!
It still works. Most of the apps are borked. Windows Explorer hasn't been updated in 5+ years so doesn't work with most sites. Baconit escaped reddit's 3rd party app purge and still works. Imgur still works well but with all the genX on it reminds me of icanhazcheezeburger.
Ah shit, here we go again
with a device equipped with a camera of sorts, if I had to guess