The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
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.
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
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.
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.