this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Jerboa also won't work with Android older than 8.0 though that's less of a problem for server ops. But it still seems like reliance on unnecessary shiny tech. My 5yo Android 7 phone still works perfectly well and I plan to keep using it a while longer, so I can't use the official Lemmy app. I wonder how fundamental Jerboa's dependence on Android 8 is. Anyone know?
The real crime here is that a 5yo android phone is running 7 which was released 8 years ago?
It actually came with Android 6, and the vendor shipped one upgrade, to Android 7. Hmm, it looks like the phone (Moto XT1625) was announced in 2016, so 7 years ago.
By keeping backwards compatibility that far back you give up on a large set of features. My guess is that Jerboa needed some feature that only exists from Android 8 and above and they didn't want to reinvent wheels.
Probably it would be best if you try to get a used phone with an more up to date Android version.
I've gotten to the point that I think that any new software release of something like Android or Firefox is likely to make it worse than before. Reddit was another example. So I resist. What feature could they possibly want from Android 8 that wasn't in earlier versions? If it was the dev kit (Jetpack) then I can sort of understand, but Android 7 has plenty of user level features, and apps such as RedReader that work fine. I'd be delighted with a RedReader port for Lemmy.
The idea of buying another phone and making more e-waste just to deal with version churn is distasteful to me. I might get interested if I can find a phone that supports Lineage really well, but otherwise I'd rather keep using what I have until it falls apart (it is getting there).
Thanks though.
I guess it's time for you to get into app development and find out firsthand.
Literally every single Google phone. Get a second hand last gen one if you're actually about reducing e-waste and that's not just an excuse.
If you mean the new Android 8 features only matter to developers, I guess I can sympathize with the Jerboa devs choosing to use them if it really made the dev work easier. From a user perspective though, Android 7 does everything I need, and RedReader shows that a Reddit viewer app can work fine in Android 7. I can't think of anything a Lemmy app needs to do that a Reddit app doesn't, though maybe I'm missing something.
I don't particularly want to become an Android app developer. That's sort of like becoming a Windows developer. I use Android basically due to lack of alternatives. 3g networks around here are now all shut down, so my Maemo phones are useless as phones, even if they weren't intolerably slow.
Reasonable point about Google phones, but they don't have headphone jacks (since the Pixel 4A which is the main one I have any interest in) and from what I can tell, battery replacement is difficult. So I'm hoping to keep using my current phone until phones with those EU-mandated swappable batteries appear.
As mentioned I think my current thought is to write an alternative web front end that is text only. We need something like that anyway.
What phone do you use? You can try out the custom roms that can upgrade your phone and help you avoid e-waste.
Moto G4 from around 2017, it's not on the list for Lineage. Custom roms are of interest though I'm a bit hesitant to mess with the roms of the phone that I use all the time. I'm not a fancy phone user but I run a few F-droid apps and make occasional phone calls.
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.
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.
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.
My 5yo phone is running Android 13. Get LineageOS.
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