this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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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.